Unix: An Oral History

This. When I was a kid, history classes were my least favorite. I just had very little interest in what I was being taught.

At some point, I started to notice that we're all showing up "in the middle of the story", so to speak, and stories about the past are immensely helpful for putting the current moment into context. This is true for what we think of as "textbook history", like the history of politics and war and the rise and fall of nations, to put current world events in context, but it's perhaps even more valuable for smaller things that matter to us more immediately in day-to-day life.

I have found that reading about the history of a scientific or mathematical field helps the ideas stick much better when trying to study. Learning about my parents' and grandparents' lives before I was born made some aspects of my childhood make a lot more sense. And reading about the history of the software and tools we use helps illuminate some of the design decisions and tradeoffs that were made.

For me, that shift didn't happen until I was well into adulthood, and I suspect that's common. I think once you reach a point where parts of your own life feel like "history", like a prelude for where you currently are, then it's a lot easier to notice the value of history in other areas.

In fairness, you're seeing a lot of survivorship bias. A lot of money and years of people's lives went into building hardware and writing software that have largely sunk beneath the waves without a trace.

Slightly related is C language using null terminated strings which is the source of buffer overflows. From what I remember the assembly languages of whatever platform they were using relied on NUL, an alternative was to use a leading single byte to set the length of the string, so "hello_world" which is 11 bytes would be:

0x0A h e l l o _ w o r l d

But that limited the length of strings to 255 characters and using two bytes rather than one would add memory pressure. Dennis Ritchie then went with null terminated strings which has the advantage of allowing any size of strings and is consistent with the assembly they were used with. The drawbacks is decades of buffer overflows :)

Eventually I found an abstract on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string#History and there is a 2011 paper about it: Communications of the ACM - Volume 54 - Issue 901 - September 2011 - pp 42–44 - https://doi.org/10.1145/1995376.1995391 . Direct link to the PDF https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1995376.1995391

> long command names are unwieldy and counterproductive (see PowerShell)

Going to have to disagree here. PowerShell reminds me of Lisp Machines/Emacs in this regard. As long as the shell supports completions this isn't an issue and aids in habituation and discover-ability IMHO.