[tern]

I suspect most people don't even know there's a there there.

For instance, while I now know that file systems have permissions, before I became a programmer, I spent maybe ten years thinking of permissions as a special, obscure system thing that you should never touch.

For that matter, I suspect many people don't know basic things like that a file system isn't inherently the operating system.

And, where would you go to learn this information? Your Mac doesn't ship with a manual—how would you know one exists? Furthermore, I would wager that perhaps most people have never learned how anything works requiring a manual and are simply unaware that that's a thing.

All to say, I'm not sure "refusal" is the right term.

[tingletech]

When I was an undergraduate biology student in 1991 a suitemate told me I should go to some desk in some building over by Muir and get an account on the VAX. There were strange rooms all over campus that were open 24/7 and were loaded with green and amber screen terminals with integrated keyboards. Lots of sessions for CS lectures were held in these rooms and there was always interesting notes on the white boards (most rooms still had black boards or green boards, but think the chalk was too dusty so these rooms usually had the white boards.

Once I saw an instruction that was circled with an arrow pointing to is that said:

  man man
  man -k -or- apropos

and that was how I learned about computers.

I just typed `man man` in a terminal on my Mac, and luckily its still there.