The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

I enjoyed G. Pascal Zachary's "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT".

Two which I found very readable while also being very technical: "IBM's Early Computers" and "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems" by Emerson Pugh.

Thanks for submitting this. I did the interview. I think you have to listen to it to get the full experience. But here are some things that were interesting and surprising from the interview:

The UNIX room - The unix room at bell labs was a shared room where they would hang out and have coffee. Some people worked exclusively in the UNIX room, like Ken Thompson, but most worked in their private offices and came to the UNIX room to share what they worked on and have a coffee and catch up. This room was the culture center of the computing group at Bell Labs.

Because they were all sharing a file system on a single machine, it was easy for various people to iterate on programs. They only had one rule which was if you changed the program last, you were the owner. In some ways, it mirrors how open source works today.

Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible. Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembler and B interpreter for a mini-computer that ran a printer they were struggling with, in a couple of days, so that they could get it printing again. This blew Brian's mind.

At the time, Brian didn't think that the work they were doing was 'important' in a big sense. The culture was more like working with computers is hard, let's try to make it better and lets try to solve practical problems.

The book "Unix: A History and a Memoir" has many other great details.

> I think the closest you get to important is thinking, “It’s hard to write programs, what can we do to make it easier to write programs? ... can I do something better on that? And if what I find challenging or hard or whatever is also something that other people find hard or challenging or whatever, then if I do something that will improve my lot, I’m perhaps improving their lot at the same time.

> Bonnie went off to California bearing their son who at the time, I think was a year old or something like that. And was there for three weeks. And so Ken figured that he was close and so he built himself basically a working operating system in three weeks. And I think you could argue that’s serious soccer productivity in some sense.

> ... And then what I showed Colby was actually something that basically said sleep for two seconds, and then print the result I had done the day before.

& I really wish the chocolate bar thing is done in my office one day!

I love Brian Kernighan interviews so I was eager to listen. I have mixed feelings.

You would often make a point and then play snippets from him supporting it. You often gave yourself center stage and used him as evidence. I found it overedited and synthetic, more a performance than an interview.

I came for BWK and left unsatisfied. If that's the style you were going for, that's fine. Maybe it's just my expectations.

It was entertaining lisen. Thank you for making it!