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The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

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Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

#51

Post by Naac »

sien wrote: post #48
gorbypark wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also recommend his book, it was an excellent read. Do you know of any more books that are similar? Historical and a little bit "technical"?

How the Internet Happened (2018) by Brian McCullough https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38212134-how-the-interne... The 'Internet History Podcast' that was made while writing the book is also excellent. The Friendly Orange Glow (2017) by Brian Dear is also very good. He's also on HN. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34373814-the-friendly-or... Accidental Empires (1996) by Robert X Cringely is also pretty good: ht…

Would you say these are as technical as Kernighan's book?

Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

#52

Post by TheGrassyKnoll »

AugieDB wrote: post #43
agbell wrote: post #15

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…

I loved this episode when I first heard it, but reading your recap of it reminds me of a similar story from my college days. I had a CompSci professor who had worked at Bell Labs, which was all of 10 minutes down the street from the college. I remember he was having problems with printing something in the computer lab one week, so he wrote a driver for the printer over the weekend. This would have been about 1997 or…

Kinda reminds me of the Erdos number (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number)

Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

#53

Post by egl2020 »

K&R is the best known, but his other books are terrific. Software Tools showed how programs can simultaneously be powerful and simple, and decades later I still use things from Kernighan and Pike. Just today I wrote an AWK one-liner to process a log file.

Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

#54

Post by sien »

Naac wrote: post #51
sien wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the Internet Happened (2018) by Brian McCullough https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38212134-how-the-interne... The 'Internet History Podcast' that was made while writing the book is also excellent. The Friendly Orange Glow (2017) by Brian Dear is also very good. He's also on HN. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34373814-the-friendly-or... Accidental Empires (1996) by Robert X Cringely is also pretty good: ht…

Would you say these are as technical as Kernighan's book?

Yep. But I wouldn't say Kernighan's book was technical. I enjoyed Kernighan's book though.

These books go into about as much detail.

It's more technical history.

Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

#55

Post by sien »

cptnapalm wrote: post #13
gorbypark wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also recommend his book, it was an excellent read. Do you know of any more books that are similar? Historical and a little bit "technical"?

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.

IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems is available on the internet archive. It's pretty pricey otherwise.

https://archive.org/details/ibms360early370s0000pugh

Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

#56

Post by vim-guru »

agbell wrote: post #15

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…

I've been enjoying your podcasts a lot over the last couple of years. Good topics, interviews and tone. Just wanted to give you some praise for a job well done.

Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

#57

Post by teleforce »

This is an old but informative video on UNIX system productivity by AT&T hosted by Brian Kernighan [1].

Fun fact, the original unused PDP-7 computer mentioned in the article that being utilized by Ken Thompson to first develop UNIX actually belongs to another well-funded sound processing research group in Bell Labs.

[1]https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0

Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

#58

Post by wolfgke »

ssivark wrote: post #46
AugieDB wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved this episode when I first heard it, but reading your recap of it reminds me of a similar story from my college days. I had a CompSci professor who had worked at Bell Labs, which was all of 10 minutes down the street from the college. I remember he was having problems with printing something in the computer lab one week, so he wrote a driver for the printer over the weekend. This would have been about 1997 or…

That’s fascinating. How is it that we seem to have lost that capability to do things in software over so few decades?

There is a talk by Jonathan Blow about this topic:

Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

#59

Post by herodoturtle »

dwcnnnghm wrote: post #39
agbell wrote: post #15

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…

> 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. For the next level up here's Ken (in a very interesting conversati…

That's really cool thanks for sharing.

I checked out that youtube link too - you might be interested to know that his t-shirt says "επιτέλους το κατάλαβα" which is Greek for "eventually I understood it" - I thought that was neat :)

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