Vintage Computer Federation
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2019–2025
1:03:51 · 418K views · May 6, 2019
Brian Kernighan interviews Unix co-creator Ken Thompson at VCF East 2019. Thompson recounts how he was hired at Bell Labs, writing the Unix kernel in about three weeks, the origins of B and TMG, pipes, and other anecdotes.
HN commenters recommend it for Thompson's funny, first-hand Unix history stories, some of which even Kernighan had not heard.
18 comments from Hacker News
Also I found these fascinating: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) has a lot of history and takes you back in time.. [LINK] Brian Kernighan 'interviews' Ken Thompson (2019) - Ken telling stories. They're both very funny, a very entertaining video, some stories I (and even Brian) hadn't heard. this video UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use (1982) [LINK] Also the other day I read in the AWK book that it was mainly inspired by SNOBOL4, so looked at some SNOBOL4 books from archive.org, from 1970-2 and just before, slightly earlier than Unix history takes you back. One tells you how to organize your punch cards to feed in the program.. Another had a bibliography with many dozens of SNOBOL books. It was widely used by people in the humanities apparently; like AWK it was at home dealing with words and text.
Two of the most interesting ones I've seen this year: Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame, and much more) interviewing Ken Thompson (initial author of UNIX, though you probably already knew both of these): lots of interesting anecdotes, like getting a chess machine seized by the US government: this video Drew DeVault, (sway/sr.ht/much more author) hacking on his Wayland VR desktop inside of his Wayland VR desktop (don't believe the people who say you can't do programming inside of VR yet!): [LINK] NB. the second video is on a PeerTube instance. PeerTube is a federated and decentralized YouTube alternative.
Looking forward to reading this! Had the pleasure of seeing Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson speak at VCF East earlier this year, totally worth a watch: this video I highly recommend hitting up a Vintage Computer Festival if you've got the opportunity ( [LINK] ). Not only did Kernighan and Thompson speak, but also Joe Decuir of Atari & Amiga fame.
> Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible. Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembler and B interpreter for a mini-computer that ran a printer they were struggling with, in a couple of days, so that they could get it printing again. This blew Brian's mind. For the next level up here's Ken (in a very interesting conversation with Brian Kernighan about the history of Unix) describing McIlroy: > McIlroy keeps coming up. He's the smartest of all of us and the least remembered (or written down)... McIlroy sat there and wrote ---on a piece of paper, now, not on a computer--- TMG [a proprietary yacc-like program] written in TMG... And then! He now has TMG written in TMG, he decided to give his piece of paper to his piece of paper and write down what came out (the code). Which he did. And then he came over to my editor and he typed in his code, assembled it, and (I won't say without error, but with so few errors you'd be astonished) he came up with a TMG compiler, on the PDP-7, written in TMG. And it's the most basic, bare, impressive self-compilation I've ever seen in my life. This story, by the way, leads into how Ken created B (and how that was eventually improved by Dennis Ritchie into C). [0] this video
The article provides ancillary hyperlinks to nearly every topic mentioned, but fails to link the actual video of Kernighan speaking. Here it is: [LINK] In reality the subject of the talk is Kernighan’s perspective of the history of Unix at Bell Labs. The questions covered in the article are the least interesting part, and make up about six minutes at the very end—a small fraction not just of the 70-minute video, but even of the 30-minute Q&A session. In short, the headline and article are disappointing clickbait, but the video itself is worth watching for Kernighan’s relating of history and his theories about what confluence of factors made Unix successful (collegial environment, good management, overall mission…). Another worthwhile video from the same conference (in a different year) is Kernighan’s interview of Ken Thompson: this video