AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System | Hacker News Reader

AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System

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RIP Dennis Ritchie. We all owe a great debt to you.

Heck, here I sit typing this in Firefox, written in C++, a derivative of C, on OS X, a derivative of the UNIX system. I have a Terminal open with which I am compiling PHP, written in C. His works are still relevant to today's world beyond the grave.

The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind when watching the video.

I wonder if Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie even imagined at the time that their creation will still be carried in the pockets of over a billion people 30 years later.

> The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind when watching the video.

Isaac Newton used the same phrase, but it was suspected he was referring to the short stature of his contemporary Robert Hooke.

Ritchie seemed down to earth, unassuming and hard working. That is why I am fond of him.

I don't know why it just happened now, but it finally dawned on me after seeing the video's kernel/shell/utilities graphic: the shell is a wrapper around the kernel.

Well... the shell is a layer above the syscall functions which are a layer above the kernel :)

The other film:

"The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw

I found the old Episodes of Computer Chronicles on Unix interesting to watch: https://archive.org/details/UNIX1985 and https://archive.org/details/unix_2

Totally unrelated: Gary Kildall comes across as if he's been a really nice guy. Poor guy. :(

Lots of female developers in this video. What happened?

I was going to mention that. I could recognize Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and Ken Thompson, but I have never heard of Lorinda Cherry [1]. Apparently, I should have, because she essentially inspired gnu plot utils, which must have had some influence on future plot utilities(?)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorinda_Cherry

edit: made a correction, oops

I don't know that gnuplot wasn't inspired by her work (it might have been). The wiki article you linked mentions GNU plotutils, which is different than gnuplot (gnuplot is not affiliated with GNU).

Right you are, made an edit.

As that one dude said at the beginning (after the guy who looks like Carl Sagan a little bit), the women in this video are not necessarily developers, but can program. At the time, I believe programming was largely done by women...the women would program the computers, while the men would design and build them. But that programming wasn't really "development", per se, it was more like grunt work. At least, this is the impression I get from conversations with my grandfather, who worked with Dr. John Mauchley on the ENIAC computer and helped found the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, one of the (if not THE) first corporations dedicated to producing computers.

Although ENIAC and such were the official start of the computing industry, the way you interacted with early computers was much different from the way you interact with the UNIX system, and thus, practically everything that's come afterward. So in many ways, this is the real start of the computing industry, to me anyways.

Looking at the wikipedia article on Ritchie, I found this photo of attendees of the 1984 Usenix Conference [0].

At the bottom of the page it points out some faces. There is a tall guy to Dennis' right, named as Erik Fair (not familiar with him, I'll admit) but he looks a lot like Larry Wall.

The only other face I recognised was Peter Langston, it demonstrates how little is known by the general public (including myself) about the contributions of all these people to CS.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usenix84_1.jpg

At exactly 7 minutes into the video, you glimpse Brian Kernighan's pair of walking boots, sporting some fabulous purple bootstraps.

I find this far more compelling for anthropological reasons than technical ones.

I think it was shared for its historical interest. While the gist of unix presented here is the same as the unix we know today, obviously many things have changed since the 1980s.

Most of the big concepts underlying Unix described in the video still apply very well to Unix today.

Right. I don't think I've heard of makewords or 'p' to print out a file, although gnu obviously has its substitutes ;)

I couldn't possibly disagree more.

The composition of programs through pipes remains a brilliant idea, and an extremely effective way to get a job done. I've lost track of the number of times I've heard a new programming tool described as "It's like Unix pipes for..."

C is still a remarkably popular programming language, and it has proven surprisingly hard to invent a new language that's better than C in every respect.

Many people could benefit from the ability to connect multiple programs in the shell to get a job done, even if they're not programmers.

It's hard for me to think of any computer scientists whose work remains as relevant today as the people in this video.

> The composition of programs through pipes remains a brilliant idea, and an extremely effective way to get a job done

Except pipes were already present in another operating systems at the time, http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html

> C is still a remarkably popular programming language, and it has proven surprisingly hard to invent a new language that's better than C in every respect.

In 70's already had a few system programming languages better than C in every respect, safety, modularization, thread support, low level programming, you name it.

C's widespread into the industry is a consequence of UNIX adoption by the industry.

Also nice to see Alfred Aho(One of the creators of Awk).

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