Stephanie Borgman
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2018–2021
1:00:38 · 120K views · Nov 8, 2018
Rob Pike gives an insider's account of the history of Unix and the development of key pieces of modern computing, including Bell Labs anecdotes.
Mostly cited as a source of Unix history stories and asides such as the Crabs prank program and the BLIT terminal.
5 comments from Hacker News
Crabs was probably the first graphical prank program—most assuredly the first well-documented one: there are a lot of scattered anecdotes about it around. Here's an amazing talk by Rob Pike where it's casually mentioned, for example: this video It's not something you see very often anymore, partially because modern windowing systems (and systems in general, really) were built with different security models in mind (you can probably remember a few similar programs released into the wild for real mode operating systems, they were especially common then), but also because windowing systems have moved away from how simple UNIX's windowing system was at the time. It's actually kind of relevant to something that was on the front-page recently: the displays they were using (JERQ/Blit bitmap displays) depended on a routine that Larry Tesler co-invented (the bit blit, hence the name "Blit"). [LINK] [LINK] If you want to give it a try, I think 9front ships with a Blit emulator these days; load up v8 and you should have a nice few hours poking around. [LINK]
this video among other things. These were places where old-school (with classical understanding, if we follow Robert M. Pirsig) people tried to reduce grounded in reality concepts to optimal (as humanly possible) implementations, as opposed to the modern tendency to pile up more and more crap.
Videos of Ken Thompson and Rob Pike telling Unix history stories: Ken Thompson (interviewed by Brian Kernighan, 2019, starts after 7m38s): [LINK] Rob Pike (Unix History presentation, 2018, starts after 3m40s): this video
another one was BLIT [LINK] [LINK] also mentioned in The History of Unix, by Rob Pike this video then there was Star
I opened this earlier, and it linked to this video -- I think a moderator may have 'fixed' it in a really silly way.