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

31–40 of 141 posts

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

#31

Post by Natales »

pvg wrote: post #21
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. Why do you feel this way? ACM has had a History of Programming Languages conference since the late 70s where the well known History of Lisp paper was presented. All sorts of popular accounts are, well, popular. Soul of A New Machine was published in '81, Hackers in '84, Accidental Empires in '92, just as a few examples off the top of my head.

I love the ACM and everyone trying to make the effort to preserve our history.

I see it from the perspective of someone working at a fast-moving, Silicon Valley-based software vendor. In that context, I don't see a lot of appreciation for history, in the day-to-day basis.

But it's not because people intrinsically don't care about it. It's more about our daily lives. We not only have to do what we all have to do, but we also have to keep up with the latest if we want to survive here. That line of thinking constantly pushes us forward, and doesn't reward looking at the past.

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

#32

Post by kernelsanderz »

softinio wrote: post #13

Is there a kindle/digital/ebook version of this book? I can't seem to find it.

This is very frustrating. From what I understand of the publishing industry, the Kindle sales are not counted towards the main NYT best-seller list, so all the focus on the initial launch is around selling the physical copy. This is said to be done to prevent gamification and manipulation, but this still goes on with the hard copies also, where would-be best-selling authors often pay third-party companies to buy a lot of copies of their books from certain bookstores.

Source: A friend of mine who has been trying to get onto the NYT best seller list.

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

#33

Post by tannhaeuser »

madhadron wrote: post #23
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. I agree. At the same time, unless you immerse yourself in oral tradition and try to assemble a picture of the diversity of what was going on from it, it's hard to get a sense of what has happened on a scale larger than a particular community, and sometimes not even then. I occasionally think about trying to write a one volume history of computi…

Also from IBM: Hypervisors/VMs, ancestors of today's containers and SGML, foundation of HTML and XML

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

#34

Post by cestith »

madhadron wrote: post #23
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. I agree. At the same time, unless you immerse yourself in oral tradition and try to assemble a picture of the diversity of what was going on from it, it's hard to get a sense of what has happened on a scale larger than a particular community, and sometimes not even then. I occasionally think about trying to write a one volume history of computi…

Largely agreed, but VMS by no means predates Unix.

Unix was in development in 1969, had a manual released inside AT&T in 1971 and was announced publicly in 1973. The first source license was sold in 1975.

VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RSX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix (which was developed on the PDP series, first the PDP-7).

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

#35

Post by onei »

madhadron wrote: post #23
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. I agree. At the same time, unless you immerse yourself in oral tradition and try to assemble a picture of the diversity of what was going on from it, it's hard to get a sense of what has happened on a scale larger than a particular community, and sometimes not even then. I occasionally think about trying to write a one volume history of computi…

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?

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

#36

Post by fourthark »

pvg wrote: post #21
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. Why do you feel this way? ACM has had a History of Programming Languages conference since the late 70s where the well known History of Lisp paper was presented. All sorts of popular accounts are, well, popular. Soul of A New Machine was published in '81, Hackers in '84, Accidental Empires in '92, just as a few examples off the top of my head.

There’s a lot of good computer history books, but a book about the early days of Unix at Bell Labs has been missing.

Glad it has finally arrived!

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

#37

Post by acqq »

cestith wrote: post #34
madhadron wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I agree. At the same time, unless you immerse yourself in oral tradition and try to assemble a picture of the diversity of what was going on from it, it's hard to get a sense of what has happened on a scale larger than a particular community, and sometimes not even then. I occasionally think about trying to write a one volume history of computi…

Largely agreed, but VMS by no means predates Unix. Unix was in development in 1969, had a manual released inside AT&T in 1971 and was announced publicly in 1973. The first source license was sold in 1975. VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RSX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix (which was developed on the PDP s…

> Unix (...) first source license was sold in 1975.

> VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RTX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix

Before VMS there was RSX-11 (note RSX not RTX):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX-11

"From 1971[5] to 1976 the RSX-11M project was spearheaded by noted operating system designer Dave Cutler, then at his first project.[5] Principles first tried in RSX-11M appear also in later designs led by Cutler, DEC's VMS and Microsoft's Windows NT.[6][7][8]"

In Dave's words:

https://tech-insider.org/windows/research/1992/11.html

"RSX-11M was introduced in 1973, 18 months after we started building"

Note Dave Cutler and note the years. I'd say the history is comparable.

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

#38

Post by sp0ck »

Watching Brian Kernighan and Professor Brailsford on YT Computerfile is pure pleasure to hear and see how world look from their perspective and quite often allows to use the same principles today. We believe so much changed in his industry but some foundations are the same like 50 years ago :)

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

#39

Post by msla »

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…

There's also the unavoidability of narratives, and how they influence what people look up to begin with. For example, there's a Unix history narrative which begins at Bell Labs goes to Berkeley and then out to the world; this is already extremely limited, in that it ignores Wollongong (where the first Unix port was done, to the Interdata/32, and where important work on TCP/IP networking was done) and what AT&T did with Unix after they closed the sources and what the Research Unix people were up to after Seventh Edition, but I think the biggest loss is that it completely sells Multics short: Unix began when Bell Labs left the Multics project, so Multics, in this narrative, is frozen in time as this unfinished thing that Our Heroes are already bailing out of, and that's what gets handed down, as if Multics never progressed an inch beyond 1969. Heck, you can even see this as Myth #1 on the multicians.org site:

https://multicians.org/myths.html

> 1. Myth: Multics failed in 1969. Bell Labs quit, Multics survived.

Now that we can use Multics about as easily as we can use Ancient Unix versions under emulation, you can spin up a perfectly functional 1980s-era Multics and see that, no, really, Multics evolved into something you can do stuff on.

That's the problem with narratives: They're both inevitable and inevitably limiting, narrowing the focus to what makes a comprehensible story as opposed to a day-by-day list of what happened. Humans create narratives as naturally, and as unavoidably, as breathing, but we have to be aware of what they do to our comprehension of history.

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

#40

Post by bitofhope »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #27
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…

That's interesting, because I also feel people don't appreciate computing history appropriately. If you'd care to learn some real history, I suggest you read The UNIX-HATERS Handbook : http://web.mit.edu/%7Esimsong/www/ugh.pdf With this book, you'll learn that UNIX and C are nothing admirable and have actually been responsible for successfully destroying much better systems and languages in the popular eye; languages…

The Handbook is a fine document and any computing history fan worth their salt should read it, but it's hardly the best analysis of Unix in a historical perspective.

Blaming (or crediting, however you want to think about it) GNU for proliferation of Unix is anachronistic. RMS has repeatedly said he doesn't care for the design of Unix, but he chose it for the ease of implementation. GNU wasn't even bootable as a stand-alone OS before 1990s and certainly not production ready until Linux was. Using GNU utilities in proprietary Unices was popular, at least since the 90s, but I never heard anyone consider them a "killer app" for Unix.

Post reply on HN