"The common thread [among Unix folk] was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them."

Oh yes, I am a textual, languagey, liberal arts guy at heart. And I am a Unix nut. Rob observes,

I find it a very humorous irony that the ultimate tool that will likely bring people back to doing more in a Unix terminal may turn out to be the latest version of MacOS...