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

111–120 of 141 posts

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

#111

Post by aasasd »

pjc50 wrote: post #98
aasasd wrote: post #88

The ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ on Amazon is pretty telling: the Snowden book, a Yubikey, an electronics testing tool, coolers for Raspberry Pi, retractable Ethernet cable, wire-type soldering iron tip cleaner (what even is that), and sandalwood shaving cream.

> wire-type soldering iron tip cleaner (what even is that), It's basically a fancy version of those metal pot scourers for cleaning the burnt bits off, but without damaging the metal plating on the tip.

Ah. Alas the only thing that I needed to clean off the iron is solder that doesn't ever want to leave the tip and go on the contacts.

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

#112

Post by kps »

throw56 wrote: post #59
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

also 'the Unix programming environment'

And The Elements of Programming Style.

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

#113

Post by pjmlp »

kabdib wrote: post #108
acqq wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple's version of Pascal had a lot of non-standard extensions. If you squinted, it was essentially C.

So any system programming language with extensions for hardware access were essentially C? Even those 10 years older than C?

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

#114

Post by cestith »

acqq wrote: post #63
cestith wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing out the typo. I'll fix that. Note "heavily influenced" doesn't make RSX-11 any more VMS than it makes Multics into Unix, or CP/M into MS-DOS, or the NeXT into a Mac, or an Alto into a Mac or Windows. Also note that 1973 doesn't significantly predate 1973. Don't confuse the first source license same with the announcement of availability, which I also noted. And Unix was in use internally at AT&T th…

Dave Cutler was the developer of of RSX-11, VMS and the NT. I don't claim that his entire life work predates the work of somebody else, just that the products he delivered are definitely comparable in its commercial availability with Unix. I would also be not surprised if his products had more users at these first years than Unix did. To do the history right one should not project the results visible today (or which…

The claim I was correcting was that VMS itself predated Unix itself. This claim is false on its face. Yes, multiple people in the history of the field have worked on more than line project.

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

#115

Post by dekhn »

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…

I know a bunch of people in the long-term UNIX community and I've always been impresssed that most of them have kept 20+ years of email. This has been helpful in figuring out various historical details.

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

#116

Post by dchest »

ghostly_s wrote: post #26
sfifs wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of using Kindle Direct publishing but not putting out a Kindle version is palpable :-) I have stopped buying paper books over past several years as they simply accumulate moisture and mould in the climate I live in and make rooms smell musty. It is incomprehensible to me why primarily textual books would be published without and ebook version these days.

Oh it's vanity press? That explains the...cover. You'd think Kernighan would have no shortage of technical presses willing to put something out on whatever terms he dictated.

It's better to call it self-publishing, not vanity press (a gatekeeping term).

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

#117

Post by michaelcampbell »

aasasd wrote: post #111
pjc50 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wire-type soldering iron tip cleaner (what even is that), It's basically a fancy version of those metal pot scourers for cleaning the burnt bits off, but without damaging the metal plating on the tip.

Ah. Alas the only thing that I needed to clean off the iron is solder that doesn't ever want to leave the tip and go on the contacts.

The thing you want solder ON has to be hot, also.

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

#118

Post by smorrow »

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?

https://disqus.com/home/discussion/tomwoods/ep_1186_lightnin...

Youtube-dl and awk to grep out of a YouTube channel.

If I were doing it again I would use youtube-dl -o to just print the base64, instead of "manually" renaming it to that with ls>awk:mv>sh.

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

#119

Post by carapace »

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…

> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry.

That is British-grade understatement right there. :)

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

#120

Post by ethbro »

pvg wrote: post #24
ethbro wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe Natales is speaking more to average everydev's state, than the existence of documented history. If history exists, but nobody reads it, then are we not still lost?

I mentioned a bunch of popular books, not academic works. One of them had a multi-episode PBS TV show over 20 years ago! Since then, popular accounts of various famous and obscure aspects of industry history, biographies key people, etc have become even more common - I just picked some somewhat older ones.

Popular with the folks around the office?

I don't work in SV, but I like to think I work in a fairly high-skill coding environment. And I regularly have to elaborate on historical references or suggestions.

Post reply on HN