>personal difficulty imagining the level of sophistication that existed prior
I think this is something that happens in our industry specifically - every few years (to me it seems like every 4 years) - we go through these phases of amnesia. I honestly think it has to do with comp-sci grads launching themselves into the industry, and .. rather than catch up on their history, re-invent things that have been standard for decades.
As you get more experience in this industry (in my case, 30+ years worth) you start to see this more and more. Something to do with the cyclomatic complexity of comp-sci history, in my opinion ..
It's an interesting phenomenon. Personally, I find that the longer I mess around with ∗nix, the more I rely on older tools (e.g. man pages instead of google, coreutils bins instead of other specific tools, etc.)
This also has the side effect of stoking my interest in the history of ∗nix and computing in general. It's kind of fun tracing posix arcana, terminal voodoo, or whatever back to it's, often haphazard, historical origins.
The story of why we have /usr/{bin,lib,sbin} etc is somewhat infamous. A cute one is how sed is a portmanteau of 's' and 'ed' from the 's' (substitute) command in ed, and grep is similarly shorthand for the "global" command 'g/RE/p' where RE stands for "regular expression".
I usually feel bad telling somebody he's spent 6 months re-inventing either Expect or Inetd (for some reason it's those two more often than anything else). But it's ultimately for the best to tell them.
Many, many good things come from re-invention in our world. I only wish there were a longer-term awareness .. because there is a devolutionary angle, where people sort of forget why its important to do/not-do things certain ways, and end up leading us all into the abyss; cf- encryption, video games, internet, etc.
I think this is something that happens in our industry specifically - every few years (to me it seems like every 4 years) - we go through these phases of amnesia. I honestly think it has to do with comp-sci grads launching themselves into the industry, and .. rather than catch up on their history, re-invent things that have been standard for decades.
As you get more experience in this industry (in my case, 30+ years worth) you start to see this more and more. Something to do with the cyclomatic complexity of comp-sci history, in my opinion ..