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VCF East: UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan
Vintage Computer Federation
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- Presented by Brian Kernighan
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
35K views1 year ago2 recommendations
History and cultureSystems programmingOperating systemsHistory of computingPeople who shaped computing
Brian Kernighan shares a personal memoir and history of the creation of UNIX at Bell Labs.
- Start - Introduction of Brian Kernighan - Brian's opening remarks, mentions previous visit with Ken Thompson - AT&T formation in 1885 - Bell Telephone Laboratories created in 1925 - Bell Labs moved to Murray Hill, NJ (1961 aerial photo) - Research achievements: transistor, laser, fiber optics, Nobel prizes - Claude Shannon and information theory - Dick Hamming and error correcting codes - Brian's 1967 internship next door to Hamming - Operating systems work begins - MIT's CTSS time sharing system (1961) - Multics project (1965) - Bell Labs pulls out of Multics (1969) - Ken Thompson's PDP-7 experiments - Ken's famous "three weeks from an operating system" quote - PDP-11/20 acquisition (~$50,000) - Classic photo of Ken and Dennis at teletypes - First edition Unix (late 1971) - Man page example (cat command) - Sixth edition Unix (1975) - the definitive version - Key features: hierarchical file system, files as bytes - John Lions' Commentary on Unix source code - Doug McIlroy's pipe idea (1964) - Pipes implemented (~1973) - Impact of pipes on programming philosophy - Spelling checker pipeline example - Document preprocessors (troff, eqn, tbl, pic) - Dennis Ritchie creates C - Evolution from BCPL → B → C - Steve Johnson's Portable C Compiler - Genesis of workstation market (Sun, SGI, etc.) - Microsoft was once largest Unix distributor - Grep history and origin - HP-35 calculator upside-down letters story (1971) - Golden age of Unix (70s-80s) - Ken and Dennis win Turing Award (1983) - National Medal of Technology (1998) - Jurassic Park "It's a Unix system!" clip - Decline factors: commercial pressures, BSD/AT&T split - Linux arrives (1991) - Unix legacy summary - How Unix happened (not planned, bottom-up) - Could it happen again? - Dennis Ritchie quote about "fellowship" - Conclusion - Q: Do you still teach? (Yes, at Princeton) - Q: Plan 9 - technical benefits and why it didn't succeed - Q: Impact of open source on Bell Labs - Q: Unix in telephone switching systems - Q: Unix portability made programmers portable - Q: Model 33 vs Model 37 teletypes and character sets - Q: Advice for young people interested in computers - Q: Pipes and standard file handles (stdin/stdout) - Q: Unix Programming Environment book with Rob Pike - Q: Thoughts on Rust replacing C - Q: Favorite distro? - Q: What was file access like before hierarchical file systems? #vcfeast #briankernghan #unix #cprogramming #vintagecomputerfederation #vcfWhy it's here
2 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as a fascinating historical memoir of UNIX and Bell Labs by one of its key contributors.
Moments people linked to
u/Andrew_G222in r/Zig • Recommends
On “Zig or Rust along with Go?”
Well, here is Brian Kernighan commenting on his experience with Rust.
He was colleagues with Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie during his time at Bell Labs, so needless to say, he's *pretty good* at programming. Granted, the question isn't directly related to Go, but considering Rob Pike and Ken Thompson (co-creators of Go and UTF-8) were very close to him, it would not be surprising if the two would feel similarly about the language.
EDIT: FORGOT THE LINK LMAO
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