“A damn stupid thing to do”–the origins of C

The linked video on the piece introduces the term “job queue” by means of programs, after being punched onto paper tape, are hung up on hooks for subsequent execution by the committer operation when the prior job completes.

https://youtu.be/6v4Juzn10gM

This is possibly the first time that a “job queue” has been recorded on video (1951) in relation to computer programs, and since the computer was single threaded and could only run one computer program at a time, it was necessary for the programs to wait in line and be manually processed in turn.

It's interesting to note that both the inventors of BCPL and C, namely Martin Richards and Dennis Ritchie, have completed PhD thesis in programming languages design about the same time [1][2].

[1]http://prog.vub.ac.be/~tjdhondt/ESL/BCPL_to_Cfront_files/p55...

[2]https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies...

"Thompson had written Unix for the PDP-7 in assembler in 1969 ... primarily for his own amusement."

As one does.

Key sentences for the urban myths about C being the first systems programming language.

> Earlier, Thompson had written Unix for the PDP-7 in assembler, but even in 1969 this was not an ideal way to write an operating system. It worked for the PDP-7 because that computer was fairly simple and because Thompson wrote the operating system primarily for his own amusement.

> Any operating system that would be maintained and updated by multiple programmers and would run on the more sophisticated hardware available at the time would need to be written in a high-level programming language.

> Thus, when Bell Labs purchased a PDP-11 for the department in 1971, Thompson decided it was time to rewrite Unix in a high-level programming language, as he told Brian Kernighan on stage at VCF 2019.