AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System

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

in “Lorinda Cherry, author of dc, bc, eqn has died” · View on HN

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

in “The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan” · View on HN

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

in “Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?” · View on HN

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"...

in “Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan” · View on HN

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

in “The Unix Pipe Card Game” · View on HN

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

in “How Unix spell ran in 64kb RAM” · View on HN

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.

in “Math from Three to Seven” · View on HN

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

in “Brian Kernighan explains Unix Pipeline (2015) [video]” · View on HN

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

in “Ask HN: Problems worth solving with a low-code back end?” · View on HN

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

in “Nixing Technological Lock In” · View on HN

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.

in “C was not created as an abstract machine” · View on HN

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)

in “A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)” · View on HN

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

in “Understanding the linux filesystem (/etc, /var, /bin, /opt etc.)” · View on HN

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.

in “ASCII table and history – Or, why does Ctrl+I insert a Tab in my terminal?” · View on HN