Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is another interesting read (book-length) along the same lines. It is not only about the tech (which it covers over a wider period than the OP, from before Unix to after it), but talks about the personal habits and idiosyncrasies of the people involved too, e.g. the penchant of some of the earlier ones for Chinese food, and the unit milliblatts :). Check it out.
The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
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Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
A lot of what Blow says is not entirely accurate. For example he presents a simple picture of declining software quality over time, but anyone who was around at the time knows that both desktop OSes and desktop applications (including web browsers) were certainly much more crashy, and probably more buggy in general, than they are now. Likely quality has started to decline again over the past decade, but it's still no…
*but anyone who was around at the time knows that in the '90s
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#73Earlier 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"?
I enjoyed G. Pascal Zachary's "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT".
There was also a book called Inside Windows NT by Helen Custer, IIRC. Had some good tech details. Had read it.
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#74I read the K&R's C Programming book when I was in undergrad. It's different from other programming books I read from APress, O'Reilly publications. Hard to digest but never before read a book so short and crisp that fully explains the programming language. To any noob programmer out there, I'd say pick K&R's book, spend a semester on it, do the exercises. You will become better engineer. You'll not regret.
For more of a "today's look" as opposed to the way C was written back then, http://www.gopl.io/ is almost as good, still the same style, meant to be digested not skimmed lightly.
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#75Thanks 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…
It was an enthralling interview, thanks so much for doing it! I've met folks who worked in Bell Labs and feel enormous envy for the opportunity they enjoyed by working there. Sadly, Bell Labs now seems like a distant, never-to-be-repeated experiment. There's so much intense focus these days on short-term ROI and responding to market pressures. Creativity and discovery very much take a back-seat to predictability and…
>Are there modern-day places like Bell Labs?
Don't know the answer to your exact question.
But I wouldn't be surprised if there are at least a few (meaning tens, if not a few hundred) of startups / small and medium companies in the world that have at least a partly Bell Labs-like tech and innovation culture, somewhat modified due to being commercial entities vs. a research place. I have come across descriptions of actual such companies in the past.
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose this is just matter of personal preference, but I'm not a big fan of this style of podcast either - although I did greatly enjoy the episode! I just felt it would have been even better if it were simply a conversation, without jumping back and forth in time, inserting explanations (although they were helpful), etc. As you said in the podcast - "start at the beginning". If it had then proceeded from the begi…
That makes sense. Part of my process is having people listen through to the interview and let me know where they get confused. Then I add in explanations there. The explanations mean people don't get lost if they don't know what punch cards are or fortan for instance. I also think there are many straight interview podcasts and I'm trying to do something different.
Makes sense! Maybe my confusion (which was more about the format than the topic), could be solved just by some subtle sound effect to mark the switch between you talking to the guest and you talking to the listener? Since there's no video in a podcast to give this context, the listener has to exert some effort trying to deduce it from other clues.
For example, Accidental Tech Podcast inserts a small jingle at the start of a sponsor break whereas Talk Python inserts a sudden awkward silence in the conversation. It took me many episodes of the latter to stop wondering if the player had crashed, or if the interviewer lost his train of thought, or the guest was offended, etc. The jingle lets the listener know what's happening, which gives a more relaxing listing experience.
So some easy way to distinguish the interview from the narration would be useful, I think.
But maybe I'll be less confused once I've listened to a few more episodes. A new podcast always takes some getting used to. Thanks for making it!
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#77Earlier 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"?
The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks about the IBM 360. Some of the essays are more relevant today than others but worth at least selectively reading.
Yes, and there is an anniversary edition. The book is mentioned in Wikipedia.
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#78For the uninitiated, Brian Kernighan also wrote a book titled "Unix: A History and a Memoir" published in 2019. Would recommend. Goodreads Link - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53011383-unix
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"?
There probably are many, you have to name your poison and search for books about it.
Almost any really major technology or tech company likely has had a book or two written about it. Some examples off the top of my head:
The HP Way
The IBM Way
The New Magicians (Microsoft)
Heard of Fire in The Valley but not read it
The Soul of a New Machine
Hackers by Steven Levy
Sure to be many books about Unix
The Art of Unix Programming (more on tech, but a good amount of history)
There probably are more books about (in no particular order):
Dell, Sun Micro, Compaq, DEC, Novell, SCO, IBM, Wordstar, WordPerfect, Lotus (both company and tech), dBASE, Borland, Microsoft, AutoCAD, Adobe, HP, Silicon Graphics, Tandem, Ardent, Amdahl, Wang, Toshiba, Acer, Sony, Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, Acorn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Amazon, Netflix, Apple and a host of lesser-known or older companies, both in the US and elsewhere. The list above has non-US companies too.
It's fun to read about the history of our field. I keep doing a bit of it now and then.
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#79Thanks 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…
The thing is that writing a printer driver was quite close to being the simplest thing in the world back then. :-)
I remember that when a friend first introduced me to Linux around 2002 (we were both high school kids), I ended up writing a rudimentary printer driver as the printing support in Linux required installing 250MB worth of packages that I simply didn't have enough space for, as I had installed Linux to a 1GB partition that I got after squeezing the Win98 on my father's laptop into 3GB. I used Red Hat Linux—not the most minimal distro but I had no idea what I was doing. So when I wanted to print something and couldn't install the printing packages, I grabbed the paperback printer manual which described all the low-level commands the printer supported, studied it to find the commands I'd need and then wrote a simple program that took an image and sent it to the printer. It couldn't have been longer than a few hundred lines.
The printers back then were simple and came with real reference manuals that documented how to communicate with the printer, so you could really write a simple printing program/driver without being a UNIX legend (I am not).
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
It's completely worth it, though. It's a surprising contender for "favorite book".