The Bible for Computer Geeks

In the beginning, the universe was /dev/null and (void).

Then the Lord said, "let there be TCP/IP!" And there was.

And the Lord said, "Whoa! It works!" And the Lord was pleased.
And the Lord went to bed, since this took all day.

And the Lord said, "Let's get some services up and running!"

And the Lord noticed that the Lord would have to write the software
on the Lord's own.

And the Lord said, "Shoot! This might take me all week!"

And so the Lord developed flowcharts. And the Lord called these
flowcharts "a waste of time", but the Lord drew them anyway, since
it's a greater waste of time to find a serious logic error when your
program is halfway written.

And this was the second day.

And the Lord said, "I've got a lot of programming to do. Let us
bring forth Jolt from the refrigerator." And the Lord saw that
it was good.

And the Lord said, "Let there be C!" And there was. And the Lord
said, "Let the headers be gathered together unto /usr/include,
and standard libraries appear." And it was so.

And the Lord said, "Let the preprocessor bring forth C code, the 
compiler yielding assembly code, and the assembler yielding object
code which is the system's kind." And it was so. And the Lord saw
that it was good.

And this was the third day.

And the Lord said, "Let there be ways of redirecting input and
output." And the Lord made two great pipes; the stdin pipe to rule
input, and the stdout pipe to rule output. The Lord made stderr also.

And the Lord made > and < tokens to make the pipes accessible from
the shell. And the Lord saw that it was good.

And this was the fourth day.

And the Lord said, "Let the process table display all the processes
running on the system, and let's make some programs worth running,
too."

And the Lord created ps(1), and every common program in /bin, and
every administration utility in /sbin. And the Lord saw that it was
good. And the Lord set them suid, as the Lord was running on caffeine
and hadn't slept since the first day.

And this was the fifth day.

And the Lord said, "Let every important system service run as an
autostarting daemon, so I don't have sit and watch them all."

And the Lord made system monitor daemons, and every server that runs
on the Net; and the Lord saw that it was good.

And the Lord said, "Let's get some users, since a system with only
one user is kind of lame." And the Lord created user accounts with
his own UID, and the Lord got some users.

And the Lord blessed them, and said unto them, "Have fun on the
system! Behold, I have given you access to every program on the
system. To you they shall be executable."

And the Lord saw everything that he had made, and it was very good.

And this was the sixth day.

And on the seventh day, the Lord rested, as the Lord had been running
on all caffeine and no sleep for six days. And that is why we rest
on the Sabbath day, and drink lots of caffeine on the other days.

And on the eighth day, the Lord said, "Let there be some games on
this system." And the Lord made nethack, and freeciv, and crossfire,
and xkobo, and that was the last we heard of anything productive
from the Lord.