Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

cs.princeton.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 141 posts

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#71

Post by acqq »

pjmlp wrote: post #44
onei wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you could make the case that windows is written in C++, which is a superset of C which was designed while writing UNIX. Sure the OS is different, but it ended up being built from the same blocks. If we didn't have C, would we have Windows as it is today?

Looking back at what Xerox PARC and ETHZ were doing with their workstations, maybe that wouldn't have been much of an issue.

Yes the high level language on first Macintoshes was Pascal. Lowest level was assembly.

Pascal was not bad at that role, and it would have been possible to develop all the code which was eventually written in C in Pascal too. At least in the dialects that weren’t made just for education.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#73

Post by KineticLensman »

sacrificedcapon wrote: post #67
Natales wrote: post #15

I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I've been lucky enough to work and hang out with some of the co-founders of very impactful projects, such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, and there are so many stories I've heard that I'm sure would be insightful and valuable lessons for whomever is embarking on new ideas. And yet, we all move so fast, that there is no time to stop and write them…

In our industry's defense, our industry is relatively young. In other words, the industry is too busy making history to appreciate it. I'm sure as time passes, we'll start to appreciate the history of the industry more and more.

> In our industry's defense, our industry is relatively young

If we take ENIAC [0] as the first computer (1945), then our industry is 74 years old. Let’s compare this with another tech industry – the aviation industry. The Wright brothers flew in 1903 [1]. 1903 + 74 = 1977.

I was a kid in the 1970s, fascinated by aerospace and aviation. There was a massive amount of aviation history around (I still have some of the aviation history books I bought then). So I think there has been plenty of time for the history of computing to appear. Even if we added another 15 years to shift the start of the history of computing (software engineering) at the development of COBOL [2] (approx the same as FORTRAN or LISP), there has still been a lot of time.

So I don’t think it’s industry youth / age alone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#74

Post by pjmlp »

jng wrote: post #57
onei wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you could make the case that windows is written in C++, which is a superset of C which was designed while writing UNIX. Sure the OS is different, but it ended up being built from the same blocks. If we didn't have C, would we have Windows as it is today?

Windows is not written in C++, even if Microsoft did embrace C++ quite a bit with the infamous MFC and so on. Windows was originally written using C and assembly language, using the Pascal calling convention for efficiency. It was originally a layer on top DOS which was written in assembly language. Being a "layer" or not was the subject of a very complex federal antitrust case back in the 90s. You can read "Undocume…

Since Windows Vista, Windows has been transitioning to C++, hence why they don't care much more about ISO C beyond of what is required by ISO C++ standard compliance.

https://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-an...

https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/4oruo1/windows_10_code...

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#75

Post by pjmlp »

doctor_eval wrote: post #49
Natales wrote: post #15

I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I've been lucky enough to work and hang out with some of the co-founders of very impactful projects, such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, and there are so many stories I've heard that I'm sure would be insightful and valuable lessons for whomever is embarking on new ideas. And yet, we all move so fast, that there is no time to stop and write them…

Do you mean DG/UX? That was an awesome OS.

Indeed, that is what we used at the campus.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#76

Post by sidpatil »

lizknope wrote: post #68
Natales wrote: post #15

I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I've been lucky enough to work and hang out with some of the co-founders of very impactful projects, such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, and there are so many stories I've heard that I'm sure would be insightful and valuable lessons for whomever is embarking on new ideas. And yet, we all move so fast, that there is no time to stop and write them…

The Computer History Museum in San Jose is a great place. I spent an entire day there. They have an excellent YouTube channel with thousands of hours of interviews with important people in the industry. They posted an interview with Brian Kernighan last week. https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTWv-l0JhAc

Slight correction: The Computer History Museum is located in Mountain View.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#77

Post by DagAgren »

Natales wrote: post #15

I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I've been lucky enough to work and hang out with some of the co-founders of very impactful projects, such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, and there are so many stories I've heard that I'm sure would be insightful and valuable lessons for whomever is embarking on new ideas. And yet, we all move so fast, that there is no time to stop and write them…

When it comes to Unix, history and the present are one and the same. We have been locked into the same model, the same OS, for decades now. Unix is being developed through small, incremental changes on top of a base that is massively out of date in 2019.

We appreciate history far too much. Unix is holding computing back, and it needs to go. It served its purpose, but it's done. It represent very few of the things that are important to computers in 2019, and it actively hinders many of them.

Unix needs be respectfully let to go into retirement, and new things given a chance to replace it finally.

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#78

Post by Nursie »

DagAgren wrote: post #77
Natales wrote: post #15

I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I've been lucky enough to work and hang out with some of the co-founders of very impactful projects, such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, and there are so many stories I've heard that I'm sure would be insightful and valuable lessons for whomever is embarking on new ideas. And yet, we all move so fast, that there is no time to stop and write them…

When it comes to Unix, history and the present are one and the same. We have been locked into the same model, the same OS, for decades now. Unix is being developed through small, incremental changes on top of a base that is massively out of date in 2019. We appreciate history far too much . Unix is holding computing back, and it needs to go. It served its purpose, but it's done. It represent very few of the things th…

Let's have this new, wonderful thing or set of things up and running before we retire what we've got, eh?

Re: Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

#80

Post by dekhn »

QualityReboot wrote: post #47
segmondy wrote: post #11

I look forward to reading this I own and have read his following books and they were all superb! The Go Programming Language The Practice of Programming The C Programming Language The AWK Programming Language

Just out of curiosity, why awk? I've only ever used it for simple text splitting and didn't really know people did more with it. Is it a tool worth learning?

awk is interesting because it was an early programming language (not just text processing) which made a number of convenient data structures available to people who could not program C.
Post reply on HN