Computerphile
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2018–2020
10:07 · 1.3M views · Jul 6, 2018
Brian Kernighan explains how grep came to be, written overnight by Ken Thompson, and how it got its name from the ed command g/re/p. He also covers the lineage from QED to ed that led to it.
HN commenters point to it as a short, charming first-hand account of Unix history from someone who was there.
4 comments from Hacker News
My favourite BWK video is about grep. this video The last part is very quotable: "They had one grave disadvantage, none of them were Ken Thompson"
Slightly off-topic, but Brian Kernighan has a great video about the origins of grep. If you know anything similar for awk, I'd enjoy watching it! this video
From the video [1]: "The UNIX text editor was called 'eee-dee' - it's not pronounced 'ed', at least by those in the know - it's pronounced 'eee-dee'. This was written by Ken Thompson, and I think it was basically a stripped down version of an editor called QED" [1] this video
"Where GREP Came From" by Brian Kernighan from Computerphile: * this video For those unfamiliar, Kernighan is the "K" in K&R C and the "K" in AWK: * [LINK]