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    UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use -- AT&T Archives film from 1982, Bell Laboratories

    AT&T Tech Channel

    6 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2015–2024

    YouTube

    23:39 · 499K views · Jan 27, 2014

    A 1982 AT&T Bell Labs film for students about the Unix system and how it can be used practically. It includes Lorinda Cherry building a talking calculator by piping together Unix commands, and a spell checker made from Unix utilities.

    HN commenters recommend it as a demonstration of the Unix philosophy, with small tools composed through pipes.

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    9 comments from Hacker News

    1. @dansoDec 2015· in “A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering (2008)”

      That was a great watch...and if you keep on watching for a few more minutes, you can watch Lorinda L. Cherry rewrite his implementation using Unix pipes and then creating a talking calculator. The screencasting technology wasn't quite there yet ;), but both are really excellent demonstrations and eludications of the Unix philosophy and mindset that is pretty much unchanged and invaluable ~34 years later this video

      Strongly recommendsView on HN
    2. @yesenadamNov 2019· in “A Mystery of Unix History”

      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. [LINK] UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use (1982) this video 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.

      RecommendsView on HN
    3. @bithive123Dec 2015· in “A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering (2008)”

      Others might also find interesting this video from 1982 where Brian Kernighan demonstrates building a simple spell checker using UNIX command line utilities: this video

      RecommendsView on HN
    4. @abetlenDec 2020· in “A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)”

      They really were. Here's a version of that video that includes Lorinda Cherry writing a talking calculator by piping together 3 unix commands. this video

      RecommendsView on HN
    5. @AmbroosFeb 2022· in “Lorinda Cherry, author of dc, bc, eqn has died”

      I love what she does here: this video , also demonstrating pipes and scripts. The input she chooses makes the whole segment pretty damn funny.

      RecommendsView on HN