Brian Kernighan on the Origins of Unix
lwn.net
lwn.net
I recommend not buying the print copy though: Amazon prints it themselves on demand and it's far and away the worst quality book I've ever held. The cover is pixellated and skewed, and most of the images inside look like they started life as 50×50px thumbnails.
Edit: apparently the Kindle version is "just the PDF of the paper version"[1] per Brian himself and is thus also terribly formatted. Welp, damned if you do. Still worth a read.
Luckily you can return stuff to Amazon, but makes me think, does that mean someone else will have to deal with purchasing that book?
I think it is more likely that, depending on your geographical location, they use different printing shops (they pick the one which is closer to you). And printing shops have widely disparate qualities, impossible to predict beforehand.
In the last years I've returned several 100-dollar Springer "hardcovers" because they were of laughably bad quality. Now I take only second-hand copies or buy them in bookstores, it's the only way to be sure.
Probably old news but fascinating all the same - clearly it was a simpler time.
28K instructions / data ops for the 'OS' and all guest programs, with 4K words (also 16 bit) of memory mapped IO / device registers.
It's clear the entire system would have been constructed in what today might be thought of as a 'Minimum Viable Product' format. Powerful functions and operations, but focused on a very narrow tolerance for inputs. The intelligence of even 'dumb' terminals makes a ton of sense and this gives me a greater perspective of the relative power required for early laser printers (rasterizing vector graphics on the fly) in the 80s.
("When in doubt, use brute force" -- Ken Thompson).
I guess this is the coding equivalent of 1950s Nuclear Family nostalgia? Pining for something you'd hate if you had to suffer under it, idealizing the past, and ignoring how and why we got to modern times (the past sucked in a lot of ways).
The Alto ran a full-fledged mouse-driven GUI, IDE + programming language with rich class library, E-Mail, text-processing in 64KB memory (128KB RAM, half of that for the screen) and 2.5MB disk.
And in fact, the only real rule there was, you changed it last, it’s yours.
At one point, I had an idea for improving the text editor, ed at the time. And so I went in and added some things to ed, very small stuff, but in that sense. And I was just perfectly fine, but I guess technically at least for a brief period, I owned ed. That encouraged you to be somewhat careful.
But I think that having everything on the same computer was contributed to a sense of community as well. And part of the community was the shared information, but the other part of it was simply knowing that other people were logged in at the same time.It’s fantastic for the Heroes of the early days of Software to have their time in the sun. It really is the age of software.
I wish Plan 9 had taken off.