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Comment by 4ad | Hacker News Reader

Brian Kernighan is my favorite technical writer (alongside Doug McIlroy, but the latter didn't write any books, Research Unix manual pages are an art form in themselves). Basic books teach you the how, good books teach you the why, but the great books -- and Brian wrote some truly great ones -- teach you wisdom.

I read "Unix: A History and a Memoir", and it's a great book if you are into computer history, but it left me very sad. I don't know why, is it because Unix (in its philosophy) is dead? Is it because the people who help create and shape Unix are old and dying? I don't know. It's a great book but it left a void in my heart.

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Read it too, and I had a similar feeling. To me it was the thought that we will probably never see a place like Bell labs -a temple to knowledge, to gather great minds and let them work on whatever they think might have interesting outcomes, no matter how long it takes to obtain results and without having to worry about short-term financial issues. Now researchers -in my country anyways- are forced into mostly researching ways to obtain funding and doing a little bit of actual research, almost as a side gig.

Google had (has?) a similar platform, but it had nowhere near the same success as Bell Labs did. They did launch some products but a lot of them failed.

Is that Google X or some other unit?

As far as I know, the Unix group has to promise to build a document processing system to get the pdp-11 they needed.

Building Unix was a specific non-goal of Bell Labs as a result of their experience with Multics.

It was the perseverance of the Unix group that made them get the resources they needed.

It's definitely a bit of a melancholy read. Some of the people who invented Unix are long gone, and we probably don't have a lot of time left with the people who are still with us. I'm glad Brian was able to tell the full story while there's still time left. We take Unix for granted, but its the basis of most of the modern operating system world.

Unix was the first accessible real computer system like we know it. I worked with AT&T and Bell Atlantic for a project, and they provided several 3B2 systems for the project and for us to work on them in ~1992. They were used internally for all sorts of business applications, and the interface was typically a green screen like a Televideo 9xx. The only other systems I found that accessible and easy to use were Sun-like CAD workstation knockoffs that ran BSD 4.3 Unix in ~1989. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3B_series_computers#3B2

I wanted to read "Unix: A History and a Memoir" but I couldn't find how to buy a DRM-free copy. It looks really good and I am glad to read that someone liked it.

You can buy a hardcopy on Amazon.

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