Rob Pike - Unix trivia | Hacker News Reader

Rob Pike - Unix trivia

plus.google.com

126 pointsscdeepak13 comments

Answers: http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/2009-01-18

Oh wow, that linked story about the origins of the 'dsw' command is really something. Simpler times indeed.

>>>59. What was "ubl"?

ubl ("under bell labs") was a AT&T UNIX port of BSD rogue with some minor changes, most significantly the name of the executable.

At the Labs, a short cut (bypassing going up to a floor with a walkway) allowed one to travel from one building to another utilizing the subfloor (hence "under bell labs") containing the pipe network for power, water, oxygen (and other gasses piped to to labs), occasionally ducking around a corner here and there. It was hot, noisy, dark and cavernous. And quite busy (esp. at lunchtime!)

Running ubl and discovering rogue was an amusing little hack. Wish I knew who was responsible!

But what is Blit, you ask? Here's a vintage demo video put together 30 years ago, complete with warbly synth score:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwIAjB99ucw

Enjoy with sound on.

David Langford's fictional BLIT ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_%28short_story%29 ) is not bad either, as a hack concept ...

What's more interesting is that the Blit and it's software suite, which was well ahead of its time (literally five years before X windows came up on the VT1000, which is a rather similar terminal hardware-wise) went absolutely nowhere in the market. No one had heard of it. No one sold it. No one produced a competitor.

And it's all because by that point AT&T had walled the Unix team off from the market. None of this stuff got out, where the equivalent (and, arguably, inferior) work that would be done at MIT years later was free.

The Blit isn't just an amusing historical note, or (yet another) testament to the brilliance of its creators. It's also a really sad existence proof of the power of open source software.

Rereading this I realize I got my hardware mixed up: X was written on the VS100 terminal. The VT1000 was, in fact, an X terminal from many years later. And early versions of X were done closer to the Blit's era, in 1984-85. It wasn't until 1986 that the widely shared X10 release showed up, though.

Into how many pieces did Ken Thompson's deer disintegrate?

That's a bit esoteric; if it's related to Unix at all, it's trivial indeed.

edit: Downvoters, enlighten me?

It's trivia, not to be confused with actual knowledge. They're essentially four decades old in-side jokes - the equivalent of asking "I can haz {what}" in 2050 and calling it "Internet trivia".

The name of Mark Pincus's dog could be considered Zynga trivia, but this sounds like personal trivia about a Unix developer. I do hope Pike expounds on some of the stories behind these.

*THE Unix developer.

Until Mark Pincus wins a Turing Award for Farmville, it's probably not fair to compare the two.

Tillbrook - might of known his team would win. Anyone else remember tips and arlo?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com