The last lecture before he cancelled things was an intro to Vim. The next would've been Emacs.
And that's the story of how I became a life-long Vim user. :-)
Within a few weeks, a friend of a friend of a friend had figured out how to pull pranks, and that opened the floodgates. Soon we all knew about man pages, about commands to query utmp and wtmp (to deduce who just did what to you or a friend), grep, file permissions, tty write permissions, quotas, nntp.
The most fun was when someone did something to you without figuring out how to stop it from being done right back to them. Many a kernel was cat'ed to someone else's terminal.
Even today when I'm trying to troubleshoot, half of the stuff I'm using was first used trying to seek revenge on a prankster. Once in a while I wonder if this would be a good way to teach a class on Unix.
Here's the script.
https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh
All I had to do was to type $diary in the terminal and I'm writing my diary in vim. I had never had more extensive record of my life. My distracted ass would never have managed this without that kind of access.
I’ve used this to figure out how much time I spent on certain tasks by sampling it Monte Carlo style. And sometimes when I run into some weird non-googleable problem, it happens again a few months later and the solution is in those files.
It’s like my own real-life syslog. Or like a scientist’s lab notebook.