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The most surprising Unix programs

minnie.tuhs.org

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Re: The most surprising Unix programs

#141

Post by AdieuToLogic »

JdeBP wrote: post #107
abetusk wrote: post #71

For me, the most surprising one was paste. paste allowed me to interleave to streams or to split out a single stream into two columns. I'd been writing custom scripting monstrosities before I discovered paste: $ paste I wonder what other unix gems I've been missing...

I would guess, from experience of people doing things the hard way, at: * John A. Kunze's jot and rs * John Kerl's mlr ("Miller") * jq * join and comm, as mentioned * fmt * ex And, given what you just wrote: * printf

A handy one to add to your list is:

seq[0]

EDIT: I didn't see that you had already included 'jot' so removed it from my original reply.

0 - https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=seq&apropos=0&sekt...

Re: The most surprising Unix programs

#142

Post by dbremner »

ivansavz wrote: post #61
mci wrote: post #26

> Hidden inside WWB (writer's workbench), Lorinda Cherry's Parts annotated English text with parts of speech, based on only a smidgen of English vocabulary, orthography, and grammar. Writer's Workbench was indeed a marvel of 1970's limited-space engineering. You can see it for yourself [1]: the generic part-of-speech rules are in end.l, the exceptions in edict.c and ydict.c, and the part-of-speech disambiguator in ps…

This Writer's Workbench seems really cool. The wikipedia page indicates there were quite a few more programs in the suite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writer%27s_Workbench#Package_c... Do you know where I could be able to find the source for all of these? I'd be interested to "revive" these utils, possibly rewriting as python or bash for easy hacking. I have some basic scrips for that, and they are already proving…

I don't think it has all of them, but [0] is a tarball from Research Unix that has some Writer's Workbench source code.

The files are in cmd/wwb.

Other tarballs may have more Writer's Workbench code but I haven't looked at them.

[0] https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dan_Cros...

Re: The most surprising Unix programs

#143

Post by mkchoi212 »

“To avoid overflow, counters were updated probabilistically to maintain an estimate of the logarithm of the count.”

Stuff like this really makes me love what the pioneers of CS did in the past. In the past, they were counting every byte and every register while nowadays, programmers make things without considering the impact it will have on the HW.

Re: The most surprising Unix programs

#144

Post by nullc »

bloomer wrote: post #130
nullc wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a performance optimization though, since otherwise would might instead just use 400 digits of precision (or whatever) all the time, and round just the output.

Somewhat, in that it doesn’t use more precision than needed, but the real issue is you can’t just pick some arbitrarily large precision and round at the end. For some calculations, even 400 digits during intermediate steps would not be enough due to catastrophic cancellation and you would need to go even higher precision to get the right answer. It really is about solving an accuracy issue and not an optimization. An…

Presumably there is a maximum precision or otherwise a seemingly innocuous calculation could run you out of memory.

Re: The most surprising Unix programs

#146

Post by chrisfinazzo »

indigochill wrote: post #31
cmroanirgo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also interesting: > Originators of nearly half the list--pascal, struct, parts, eqn--were women, well beyond women's demographic share of computer science.

In the 40s, computing was seen as primarily women's work (similar to the stereotype of switchboard operators). Into the 60s, women still comprised up to half of the computing workforce. In 84, they peaked at 37%. So demographically speaking, the ratio was not as bad as it is today. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing )

Clive Thompson's book "Coders" goes into this demographic shift in considerable depth - currently reading, would highly recommend. At least in those days, if you were reasonably smart and detail oriented, it was possible to find a way in.

Dad - a history major turned COBOL programmer and later, project manager - found his way into his prior company (and then stayed for 32 years) by this route.

He met Mom there too - also not uncommon for the time - who was a math major who decided that teaching wasn't the right fit for her.

Re: The most surprising Unix programs

#147

Post by reaperducer »

ruricolist wrote: post #137
reaperducer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Into the 60s, women still comprised up to half of the computing workforce. My life experience corroborates this. When I was in school, girls were taught to type, and boys weren't. Because of that, many of the girls from my school went into computing, while the boys went to more "manly" pursuits. It's also why Catholic nuns were over-represented in early computing.

"It's also why Catholic nuns were over-represented in early computing." Would you mind expanding on that?

Highly educated, and able to type. The first woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science was a nun in Ohio.

Catholic nuns have done much for the business world that is overlooked.

From memory, so no citations:

The first female CEOs were Catholic nuns — in the early 1900's, a time when women in the American workplace was uncommon, Catholic nuns founded over 800 hospitals in the United States. They also ran schools, colleges, and universities.

The concept of just-in-time delivery was invented by nuns running those hospitals.

The first health insurance company was founded in Missouri by nuns to care for railroad workers.

There are others. I once ran across a list of them on the intarwebs, but these are the ones that stuck with me.

Re: The most surprising Unix programs

#148

Post by samatman »

indigochill wrote: post #31
cmroanirgo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also interesting: > Originators of nearly half the list--pascal, struct, parts, eqn--were women, well beyond women's demographic share of computer science.

In the 40s, computing was seen as primarily women's work (similar to the stereotype of switchboard operators). Into the 60s, women still comprised up to half of the computing workforce. In 84, they peaked at 37%. So demographically speaking, the ratio was not as bad as it is today. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing )

In the 40s, most computers were women.

This sounds really weird to modern ears but it's literally true. Computer was a job before it was a machine.

Re: The most surprising Unix programs

#149

Post by tenebrisalietum »

Torwald wrote: post #140

What does he man by "record structure in the file system" in re to Multics?

Unix files are simply a stream of bytes and outsource concern of file structure to userland. There's nowhere to set/get a type, no mechanism to create schema in the file like fields, lengths, constraints, etc. You simply can seek to a place in the file (if it's seekable) and read/write the bytes. What they mean is up to the programs/user/convention.

Earlier filesystems were trying much more to be like databases.

Re: The most surprising Unix programs

#150

Post by chrisfinazzo »

nonesuchluck wrote: post #90
indigochill wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 40s, computing was seen as primarily women's work (similar to the stereotype of switchboard operators). Into the 60s, women still comprised up to half of the computing workforce. In 84, they peaked at 37%. So demographically speaking, the ratio was not as bad as it is today. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing )

I feel like the line between computer user/operator and computer programmer used to be fuzzier. I've always wanted to better understand how and where that distinction has shifted over time. To this day, IBM calls mainframe operators, "systems programmers." I suspect that shifting narrative may tell a chapter of the story of how women were gradually pushed out of our industry.

Talking to my parents, there was definitely a hierarchy between the two.

Although the programmers might have looked down on the operators as grunts, these people were in the privileged position of actually getting to interact with the machine directly, which is something.

You're pretty much right on re their exodus. Thompson's book, which I mentioned in my earlier comment, has a chapter called 'The ENIAC Girls Vanish'.

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