AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System

One of the few living oldschool UNIX legends still alive. Here is when he was young: ▶ this video Kind of explains in an epic manner why pipes were useful back then. They are still useful, but computers are so much more powerful that many techniques back then came primarily because their computers were not as powerful. I still, oddly enough, prefer the hardware of the 1970s, 1980s, almost early 1990s too. Today's hardware is much better, but I am nowhere as interested in it; it is now just like a common tool.

Nit: You can get a link to a specific time in the video by clicking the "share" button and ticking "start at": ▶ this video

This gets shared a ton, but the old Bell Labs video from 4:56 to 10:52 is still the best way I have seen pipes explained: ▶ this video

One a similar note, there is this period video where Brian Kernighan shows how to construct a spell checker using a UNIX shell one-liner: ▶ this video

Good example of passion from early bell Labs: ▶ this video Other examples I can think of (from my Gen Z experience, growing up in SoCal): - Elementary school: Making custom action replay codes, hacking game saves with programs, CheatEngine/memory/hex editor and following YouTube tutorials, Javascript "document.contentEditable=true" hack and changing stuff on websites, pressing F12 and changing random javascript code until something interesting happens or breaks. - Middle school: making sites on Weebly/freewebs, embedding chats and flash games on them, sharing them during computer class - High school: Making PHP sites/vbulliten/Newgrounds/flash games, later iOS apps I wasn't the only one doing these things. There were always like 3 other kids like me in any classroom that would do the same things. Most of us ended up becoming passionate SWEs, besides one that became an accountant.

See also a much younger Brian from 40 years ago explaining pipeline ▶ this video Similar but using redirects instead of pipes link

In context of creating hyper useful applications low code means 5 things. 1 Process manager, where you think in terms of users. Each step is a state machine. Ex: Anonymous visit has signup and contact. Registered user has update profile, upload video. To understand what process management means read up on the Mechnical Turk that played chess, and understand that a self checkout machine occasionally backed by a cashier is the same thing. Then realize you can email people asking them to do a task. And now you are programming not just with a CPU, but AI, and Humans in the circuit as well. 2 Drag and Drop Web page designer, here each of the states above, are expressed as web pages, that can shift state via UI interaction. ex. Clicking update profile, or upload video buttons. Think HyperCard, and look at the modern Bento Box Web Page Builders. 3 Visual Relational Database Builder, here you define tables, and their relationships, the form designer below will use those to help you make forms. See File Maker. 4 Form designer, just think of the form as a complex UI component. But, the button here, does not immediately shift state. So signup, must not shift state to registered until checks are made. Here a drag and drop visual programming language comes in to picture. 5 Drag and Drop Visual Programming Language, the click of a button is interpreted as a source of an object stream. Think packet oriented programming, of reactive functional programming, or RxJs, or Node-RED. To answer you

Because the term 'unix system resources' is made up after the fact. It is not in the FHS. There are no sources for it. It is hearsay. There is plenty of evidence that /usr used to be the home directories, iirc it was like that in Illumos until 1988. Edit: Evidence for "user": ▶ this video

I try to always understand the current state of things in the context of how they were before the current state. C and Unix came on to the scene - and they were much much better than what came before. Users were meant to use the shell commands + awk and get a whole lot done with that. C programs were meant to be small. How small? Well - how much code would you be able to write using ed? I think Unix intended for programmers to develop languages for users - use lex and yacc to come up with something to hand off to users. The Unix operating system assumed a corporate org structure that just does not exist. Genius programmers and highly educated users. ▶ this video <--- this is what they were expecting If we went back in time to tell them how real corporations would be set up, I think C would have had safe defaults that could be disabled when needed and syntax closer to Go than C. In fact if we told them how things would be in 40 years, they would have settled on the erlang VM for stuff outside of systems and graphics programming.

Brian, on the other hand, has an excellent, powerful posture: ▶ this video (see from 4'10). Feet on desk, keyboard on lap, reclined seat, talking about unix filters.

bwk is awesome AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System : ▶ this video Coolest guy in this video, casually explaining pipes while resting his feet on the desk.

Was just showing the subject to a youngster recently. Other folks mentioned the Code book, I liked that one. The MMM by Brooks of course. We also looked at the following videos on youtube/Kanopy and other places: - The Story of Math(s) by Marcus du Sautoy to set the stage... school and taxes in ancient Sumeria, Fibonacci bringing Indian numbers to Europe, and other fascinating subjects. - We watched short biographies of Babbage and Lovelace, full-length ones of Turing and Von Neumann. The "code breakers" of WWII. - Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII, another good one. - There's more history in PBS' Crash Course Computer science, than you might expect. It is great although so peppy we had to watch at .9x with newpipe. Shows relays, vacuum tubes, to ICs, to the Raspberry Pi. As well as the logic gates they model. - "The Professor" at Computerphile is a great story teller about the early days. - There are great videos about CTSS being developed at MIT I think, where they are designing an operating system via paper terminal and trying to decide on how to partition the memory/storage: link - The Introducing Unix videos by ATT are straight from the source: ▶ this video - The movie/book "Hidden Figures" touches on this time as well. Facing obsolescence by IBM, one of the characters teaches herself Fortran. - The Pirates of Silicon Valley is a fun dramatization of the late 70s to 80s PC industry. It specifically calls out the meeting between MS and IBM as the deal of the

Rest in Peace! Her demonstration of the capabilities of the (then novel) pipes and scripts of the Unix Operating System is one of the best parts of this documentary: ▶ this video

Interestingly enough, this video from the 1980s shows Brian Kernighan writing a one line spellchecker program in UNIX shell. Obviously, the computer that it’s running on is more powerful than a 256K PC. The point stands: some people are simply living in the future. ▶ this video (Shell coding starts at 8:40)

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] ▶ this video

> Recently I discovered the AT&T history channel, with this gem: ▶ this video I go back to this video every once in a while ever since I discovered it a few years ago. I just think it is super relaxing. When I first watched it, I was beginning to use Linux and, when I opened my terminal emulator, I was like: "It's a Unix system, I know this!" The pipelines explanation was incredibly clear. I also love the Computerphile episodes with professor Kernighan.

I'm always amazed how well Brian Kernighan can explain things. I love the episodes on the Computerphile youtube channel with him. Recently I discovered the AT&T history channel, with this gem: ▶ this video There is a massive difference in appearance and clarity between him and the other people appearing in that video, even the "presenter"...

For me it's the unix example in [1] "AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System" . $ makewords sentences | lowercase | sort | unique | mismatch - It reads a file called sentences then prints the words that are not spelled correctly. To me it's; concise, expressive, flexible, modular... Which makes it beautiful... [1] ▶ this video

Nice guide. cd ~ command goes to home directory though, not root. I wish someone showed me the UNIX operating system introduction by Kernighan et al before anything else. It can be found in AT&T arhives: ▶ this video

Well, in 1992 when I learned it, it seemed like a long established and widespread practice. And I could hardly be blamed for not having a personal data point of the pronunciation when I was one years old. :) If you look up "etc unix pronounciation", while there is a lot of bickering, I still think "etsy" is the slight majority among old timers. I will admit that this usage seems to have faded. I spent some time trying to find video of any of the original Bell Labs Unix team actually saying the directory out loud--I couldn't find any. I'm going to keep searching, but they honestly seem to go out of their way to avoid it. I did find some fascinating videos along the way [1]. To my chagrin, there are a few oblique text references on the web that say indicate that within Bell Labs, it was pronounced "etcetera". But I'd still like a canonical reference. [1] Like this video from 1982, including Kernighan, Thompson, Ritchie, and Aho. ▶ this video