AT&T Tech Channel
10 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2013–2026
27:27 · 2.2M views · Feb 22, 2012
A 1982 Bell Labs film hosted by Victor Vyssotsky on the origins and design philosophy of the UNIX operating system, with appearances by Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie. It shows pipes, filters and a shell one-liner spell checker being built.
HN points people to it as the clearest primary-source explanation of Unix pipes and the small-tools philosophy, straight from the creators.
20 comments from Hacker News
> Recently I discovered the AT&T history channel, with this gem: this video I go back to this video every once in a while ever since I discovered it a few years ago. I just think it is super relaxing. When I first watched it, I was beginning to use Linux and, when I opened my terminal emulator, I was like: "It's a Unix system, I know this!" The pipelines explanation was incredibly clear. I also love the Computerphile episodes with professor Kernighan.
Nice guide. cd ~ command goes to home directory though, not root. I wish someone showed me the UNIX operating system introduction by Kernighan et al before anything else. It can be found in AT&T arhives: this video
This gets shared a ton, but the old Bell Labs video from 4:56 to 10:52 is still the best way I have seen pipes explained: this video
Was just showing the subject to a youngster recently. Other folks mentioned the Code book, I liked that one. The MMM by Brooks of course. We also looked at the following videos on youtube/Kanopy and other places: - The Story of Math(s) by Marcus du Sautoy to set the stage... school and taxes in ancient Sumeria, Fibonacci bringing Indian numbers to Europe, and other fascinating subjects. - We watched short biographies of Babbage and Lovelace, full-length ones of Turing and Von Neumann. The "code breakers" of WWII. - Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII, another good one. - There's more history in PBS' Crash Course Computer science, than you might expect. It is great although so peppy we had to watch at .9x with newpipe. Shows relays, vacuum tubes, to ICs, to the Raspberry Pi. As well as the logic gates they model. - "The Professor" at Computerphile is a great story teller about the early days. - There are great videos about CTSS being developed at MIT I think, where they are designing an operating system via paper terminal and trying to decide on how to partition the memory/storage: [LINK] - The Introducing Unix videos by ATT are straight from the source: this video - The movie/book "Hidden Figures" touches on this time as well. Facing obsolescence by IBM, one of the characters teaches herself Fortran. - The Pirates of Silicon Valley is a fun dramatization of the late 70s to 80s PC industry. It specifically calls out the meeting between MS and IBM as the deal of the
One of the few living oldschool UNIX legends still alive. Here is when he was young: this video Kind of explains in an epic manner why pipes were useful back then. They are still useful, but computers are so much more powerful that many techniques back then came primarily because their computers were not as powerful. I still, oddly enough, prefer the hardware of the 1970s, 1980s, almost early 1990s too. Today's hardware is much better, but I am nowhere as interested in it; it is now just like a common tool.