My very first programming experience was the integrated shell of Python 2.6, maybe 2.7. I followed wikis and tutorials in order to print various fun little things. Everything past that was further layers of abstraction, buttons, magic, and GUIs.
I was whisked away into the faintly surreal and inexplicable tornado of Android Studio and XCode until my first year of college, at which point a college professor, during the third lecture of class, was asked, "how many students fail out during this course?"
The professor paused for a moment, and said, "I'm not sure -- let me count the number of failing grades from last semester's final," at which point he piped his grade book into a terminal, straight into a series of bash commands that gave him the precise number of final exams that had scored below a 55.
Thinking back, it's not the fact that he could do that -- I sort of knew that was possible, even with a fairly basic understanding of computers. It was the ease, the fluency with which he did it.
Right then, I understood that programming was the closest I was ever going to get to my childhood understanding of alchemy/magic/psionic powers. And maybe even a little bit further than that.
That is what Unix will always mean to me. A genuine, actual, factual spellbook, inexplicably and suddenly laid at my feet.