Unix as literature
My acquaintances know that I work in computers; my friends may know that I’m a Unix developer & sysadmin; my close friends might actually know that Unix is a computer operating system. What few if any of them know is why I use Unix, why I love using it and why I will not own a computing device without it. It boils down to the fact that I do not merely use computers; I wield them to some end — and there has not been an OS which has combined mainstream success and wieldability like Unix has.
Way back in the Dark Ages when I was in college, Thomas Scoville noted that Unix afficianados are a different sort; I think this is why. We don’t just use some code someone else wrote to make the computer do something he thought of; we write our own, to make the computer do something noöne ever thought of before. We don’t react to some foreseeable problem in some predetermined manner; we prevent the foreseeable problems from occurring in the first place, and discover new ways of resolving the unforeseeable.
A computer which doesn’t empower me in that way is merely a device. I might use it as I do a toaster, a screwdriver or a phone, but I will never live in it as I do on a command line.