Comments on: Unix at 50 https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2019/11/22/unix-at-50/ All about electronics and circuit design Sun, 15 Nov 2026 23:39:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.14 By: Tomi Engdahl https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2019/11/22/unix-at-50/comment-page-1/#comment-1891001 Tue, 27 Oct 2026 08:55:01 +0000 http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/?p=184802#comment-1891001 https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1KAUYqRwqR/

Ken Thompson wrote Unix in 3 weeks

Brian Kernighan (Bell Labs MTS): “Ken Thompson’s the obvious one, I think. Certainly the best programmer I’ve ever met. And the story is the first version of Unix, where he’s got this little old PDP-7, which is an obsolete machine, has something like 8K 18-bit words.

So it’s a tiny little machine. And he’s been fooling around with something to drive the disk on it. And he’s thinking about how do you schedule disk operations so that it’ll go fast and stuff like that.

And his wife takes their young son off to California for 3 weeks, and he thinks, I could do something here. And so in 3 weeks, he builds himself an editor, an assembler, and an operating system, and there you have it.”

Ryan: “By himself?”

Brian: “Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely.”

For the full conversation, you can search Brian Kernighan on my YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts (link in bio)

Video
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1SjimUyMEa/

]]> By: Tomi Engdahl https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2019/11/22/unix-at-50/comment-page-1/#comment-1846831 Fri, 21 Feb 2025 07:45:27 +0000 http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/?p=184802#comment-1846831 https://hackaday.com/2025/02/20/unix-archaeology-turns-up-1972-v2-beta/

]]> By: Tomi Engdahl https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2019/11/22/unix-at-50/comment-page-1/#comment-1663453 Sun, 08 Dec 2019 03:59:43 +0000 http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/?p=184802#comment-1663453 Douglas McIlroy is a professor of computer science, mathematician, engineer and famous programmer. He is one of the original Bell Labs Unix pioneers. You can thank him for UNIX pipelines, diff, sort, tr, and many other commands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy

]]> By: Tomi Engdahl https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2019/11/22/unix-at-50/comment-page-1/#comment-1661417 Tue, 26 Nov 2019 15:54:38 +0000 http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/?p=184802#comment-1661417 “UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.” — Dennis Ritchie

#sysadmin #BSD #Linux #IT #devops

]]> By: Tomi Engdahl https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2019/11/22/unix-at-50/comment-page-1/#comment-1661416 Tue, 26 Nov 2019 15:51:59 +0000 http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/?p=184802#comment-1661416 Y2K38: Everything will crash again!

]]> By: Tomi Engdahl https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2019/11/22/unix-at-50/comment-page-1/#comment-1661244 Mon, 25 Nov 2019 09:32:05 +0000 http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/?p=184802#comment-1661244 The UNIX legacy is a set of simple and timeless tools that can take years to master but which can perform seeming miracles in seconds in the hands of experienced users or sysadmins or developers.

]]> By: Tomi Engdahl https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2019/11/22/unix-at-50/comment-page-1/#comment-1660925 Fri, 22 Nov 2019 18:54:28 +0000 http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/?p=184802#comment-1660925 UNIX was so successful, in fact, that it was difficult for any subsequently developed operating systems (such as Linux, Windows, BSD, Android, iOS and others) to not be influenced by it.

]]> By: Tomi Engdahl https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2019/11/22/unix-at-50/comment-page-1/#comment-1660924 Fri, 22 Nov 2019 18:34:18 +0000 http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/?p=184802#comment-1660924 More videos here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5MKwp2uj2k

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