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Stephen Bourne: Early days of Unix and design of sh

Andrea Ross

4.1K subscribers • 3 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 1 on Lobsters and 1 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2021 to 2026.
  • Presented by Stephen Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

17K views11 years ago2 recommendations

History and cultureSystems programmingHistory of computingOperating systemsPeople who shaped computing

Stephen Bourne shares historical anecdotes about the development of Unix, the design of the Bourne shell, and early C language decisions.

by Stephen Bourne

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2 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as an entertaining historical talk about Unix, the Bourne shell, and how the void keyword was introduced to C.

Moments people linked to

inactive-useron Lobsters • Recommends

Early days of Unix and design of sh
9View on Lobsters

u/BigSneakyDuckin r/C_Programming • Recommends

On “Did the void keyword come from C or C++?”

It seems Stephen Bourne, who was very used to ALGOL (as you can easily see in his shell!), was instrumental in persuading Dennis Ritchie to put void into C in the late 1970s. Bourne talks about this in a very entertaining BSDCan talk. https://www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/events/612.en.html [video (time of the void anecdote but the whole thing's interesting) https://github.com/pkivolowitz/asm\_book/blob/main/section\_1/funcs/README.md#returning-values For amusement... this is how ALGOL-like Bourne's source code was. Maybe not surprising it inspired the birth of the IOCCC! https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7-Snapshot-Development/usr/src/cmd/sh/mac.h https:/…
1View on Reddit