10 ms·

I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I've been lucky enough to work and hang out with some of the co-founders of very impact

I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I've been lucky enough to work and hang out with some of the co-founders of very impactful projects, such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, and there are so many stories I've heard that I'm sure would be insightful and valuable lessons for whomever is embarking on new ideas. And yet, we all move so fast, that there is no time to stop and write them down. I'm glad BK did. UNIX is foundational to essentially all software-driven technology today, in one way or another. His book (along with Dennis Ritchie) on the C Programming Language made a huge impact for me as a CompSci student in the 80s, as did UNIX itself (Ultrix and DG/OS were my fist UNIX variants). I look forward to read his book.

ethbro 7y ago
Absolutely agreed. It's a shame we talk past each other, when so many answers were already discovered and documented in the past. I try and keep the following in mind (even when my ego fights it). (A) I am very unlikely to be the smartest person who's ever thought about a problem. (B) Even if their technology differed, some parts of their approach are useful. (C) Clues and references pop up in the oddest places, so ears open and notepad ready. (D) Accept references graciously, in the spirit of a gift. (E) Name dropping historical references without providing actual context is always in poor taste.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  >I try and keep the following in mind (even when my ego fights it). >(A) I am very unlikely to be the smartest person who's ever thought about a problem. My god.
  - globuous 7y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
    - fao_ 7y ago
      I think the person in question is stating that the person they're responding to _shouldn't have to remind themselves of those things_
pvg 7y ago
I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. Why do you feel this way? ACM has had a History of Programming Languages conference since the late 70s where the well known History of Lisp paper was presented. All sorts of popular accounts are, well, popular. Soul of A New Machine was published in '81, Hackers in '84, Accidental Empires in '92, just as a few examples off the top of my head.
- ethbro 7y ago
  Believe Natales is speaking more to average everydev's state, than the existence of documented history. If history exists, but nobody reads it, then are we not still lost?
  - pvg 7y ago
    I mentioned a bunch of popular books, not academic works. One of them had a multi-episode PBS TV show over 20 years ago! Since then, popular accounts of various famous and obscure aspects of industry history, biographies key people, etc have become even more common - I just picked some somewhat older ones.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      Popular with the folks around the office? I don't work in SV, but I like to think I work in a fairly high-skill coding environment. And I regularly have to elaborate on historical references or suggestions.
      - pvg 7y ago
        I'm at a bit of a loss at what to tell you. I feel like we have just about overwhelming evidence that the claim the computer industry is uninterested in its own history is inaccurate. Beyond the tiny smattering of it I've mentioned, that evidence pokes us in the eye every day from the front page of HN. The person who brought this up is apparently too busy to evaluate any evidence and you are telling me the good people at your office know less about computer industry history than you do - a thing that might be as true and as nondispositive about anything ranging from Pokémon to Ming Dynasty Porcelain.
madhadron 7y ago
> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I agree. At the same time, unless you immerse yourself in oral tradition and try to assemble a picture of the diversity of what was going on from it, it's hard to get a sense of what has happened on a scale larger than a particular community, and sometimes not even then. I occasionally think about trying to write a one volume history of computing. > UNIX is foundational to essentially all software-driven technology today, in one way or another. Except Windows, which comes from VMS, which predates Unix. And SQL, which comes from IBM mainframe land. I could probably come up with a few more, but it's late and I'm tired.
- WalterGR 7y ago
  Lisp comes to mind.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  Also from IBM: Hypervisors/VMs, ancestors of today's containers and SGML, foundation of HTML and XML
- cestith 7y ago
  Largely agreed, but VMS by no means predates Unix. Unix was in development in 1969, had a manual released inside AT&T in 1971 and was announced publicly in 1973. The first source license was sold in 1975. VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RSX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix (which was developed on the PDP series, first the PDP-7).
  - acqq 7y ago
    > Unix (...) first source license was sold in 1975. > VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RTX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix Before VMS there was RSX-11 (note RSX not RTX): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX-11 "From 1971[5] to 1976 the RSX-11M project was spearheaded by noted operating system designer Dave Cutler, then at his first project.[5] Principles first tried in RSX-11M appear also in later designs led by Cutler, DEC's VMS and Microsoft's Windows NT.[6][7][8]" In Dave's words: https://tech-insider.org/windows/research/1992/11.html https://tech-insider.org/windows/research/1992/11.html "RSX-11M was introduced in 1973, 18 months after we started building" Note Dave Cutler and note the years. I'd say the history is comparable.
verisimilitudes 7y ago
That's interesting, because I also feel people don't appreciate computing history appropriately. If you'd care to learn some real history, I suggest you read The UNIX-HATERS Handbook: http://web.mit.edu/%7Esimsong/www/ugh.pdf http://web.mit.edu/%7Esimsong/www/ugh.pdf With this book, you'll learn that UNIX and C are nothing admirable and have actually been responsible for successfully destroying much better systems and languages in the popular eye; languages including Lisp, APL, Simula, ALGOL, Smalltalk, and Forth all existed before C; systems such as ITS and Multics addressed concerns UNIX users still suffer under today. Make no mistake, for all of RMS' admirable qualities, he's basically responsible for UNIX proliferating by copying it for GNU. You also shouldn't look at your modern BSD or GNU system and think this is what UNIX users used decades ago, because for all of their faults, GNU and BSD actually try to produce programs which work correctly and GNU goes much farther than several of the BSDs in this respect. The UNIX attitude is one of getting half the job done and leaving it at that. In closing, UNIX has no philosophy. The UNIX philosophy is simply brand-named simplicity. The ideas of modularity and simplicity predate automatic computing and recorded history, and yet people will claim you're following UNIX if you write a program which adheres to these basic ideals. Further, those other qualities of this philosophy result in programs that aren't modular, simple, nor beautiful.
- bitofhope 7y ago
  The Handbook is a fine document and any computing history fan worth their salt should read it, but it's hardly the best analysis of Unix in a historical perspective. Blaming (or crediting, however you want to think about it) GNU for proliferation of Unix is anachronistic. RMS has repeatedly said he doesn't care for the design of Unix, but he chose it for the ease of implementation. GNU wasn't even bootable as a stand-alone OS before 1990s and certainly not production ready until Linux was. Using GNU utilities in proprietary Unices was popular, at least since the 90s, but I never heard anyone consider them a "killer app" for Unix.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    I used to have a couple of PC World articles about Windows winning the Workstation market, until about GNU/Linux started to be mature enough to allow easy porting of commercial UNIX stuff into them. Had Microsoft and IBM kept serious about their POSIX compatibility subsystems instead of a bullet point to win government contracts, and history would have played out much differently.
msla 7y ago
There's also the unavoidability of narratives, and how they influence what people look up to begin with. For example, there's a Unix history narrative which begins at Bell Labs goes to Berkeley and then out to the world; this is already extremely limited, in that it ignores Wollongong (where the first Unix port was done, to the Interdata/32, and where important work on TCP/IP networking was done) and what AT&T did with Unix after they closed the sources and what the Research Unix people were up to after Seventh Edition, but I think the biggest loss is that it completely sells Multics short: Unix began when Bell Labs left the Multics project, so Multics, in this narrative, is frozen in time as this unfinished thing that Our Heroes are already bailing out of, and that's what gets handed down, as if Multics never progressed an inch beyond 1969. Heck, you can even see this as Myth #1 on the multicians.org site: https://multicians.org/myths.html https://multicians.org/myths.html > 1. Myth: Multics failed in 1969. Bell Labs quit, Multics survived. Now that we can use Multics about as easily as we can use Ancient Unix versions under emulation, you can spin up a perfectly functional 1980s-era Multics and see that, no, really, Multics evolved into something you can do stuff on. That's the problem with narratives: They're both inevitable and inevitably limiting, narrowing the focus to what makes a comprehensible story as opposed to a day-by-day list of what happened. Humans create narratives as naturally, and as unavoidably, as breathing, but we have to be aware of what they do to our comprehension of history.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Specially annoying with that narrative, for those that care about computing history, is as C and UNIX are sold as the first of their kind, invented on magic moment, hand-waving what everyone else was doing. Since history belongs to winners, if it wasn't for the accessibility of old conference papers and computer manuals, that would be indeed the only one we had to believe on.
  - zantana 7y ago
    I always thought one of the most interesting insights into this was the Unix Haters Handbook https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf especially Dennis Richie's anti forward: The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below. Your judgments are not keen, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome. Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred.
doctor_eval 7y ago
Do you mean DG/UX? That was an awesome OS.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Indeed, that is what we used at the campus.
- Natales 7y ago
  Yes! sorry for the memory lapse.
sacrificedcapon 7y ago
In our industry's defense, our industry is relatively young. In other words, the industry is too busy making history to appreciate it. I'm sure as time passes, we'll start to appreciate the history of the industry more and more.
- andreb 7y ago
  We like to think that, but we do a lot of rediscovery of techniques and approaches that were invented in the 60s/70s.
- KineticLensman 7y ago
  > In our industry's defense, our industry is relatively young If we take ENIAC [0] as the first computer (1945), then our industry is 74 years old. Let’s compare this with another tech industry – the aviation industry. The Wright brothers flew in 1903 [1]. 1903 + 74 = 1977. I was a kid in the 1970s, fascinated by aerospace and aviation. There was a massive amount of aviation history around (I still have some of the aviation history books I bought then). So I think there has been plenty of time for the history of computing to appear. Even if we added another 15 years to shift the start of the history of computing (software engineering) at the development of COBOL [2] (approx the same as FORTRAN or LISP), there has still been a lot of time. So I don’t think it’s industry youth / age alone. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL
lizknope 7y ago
The Computer History Museum in San Jose is a great place. I spent an entire day there. They have an excellent YouTube channel with thousands of hours of interviews with important people in the industry. They posted an interview with Brian Kernighan last week. https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTWv-l0JhAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTWv-l0JhAc
- sidpatil 7y ago
  Slight correction: The Computer History Museum is located in Mountain View.
- trenchgun 7y ago
  Thanks! I am visiting San Francisco soon and will definitely go check the Computer History Museum.
- emplynx 7y ago
  These interviews are so good.
DagAgren 7y ago
When it comes to Unix, history and the present are one and the same. We have been locked into the same model, the same OS, for decades now. Unix is being developed through small, incremental changes on top of a base that is massively out of date in 2019. We appreciate history far too much. Unix is holding computing back, and it needs to go. It served its purpose, but it's done. It represent very few of the things that are important to computers in 2019, and it actively hinders many of them. Unix needs be respectfully let to go into retirement, and new things given a chance to replace it finally.
- Nursie 7y ago
  Let's have this new, wonderful thing or set of things up and running before we retire what we've got, eh?
  - DagAgren 7y ago
    We can't, because nobody will even consider giving anything new a chance if it is not Unix.
    - Nursie 7y ago
      So you propose what, that the industry as a whole voluntarilty re-enters the dark ages by throwing away its current crop of systems with no replacement in sight ?! It looks to me like our current crop of unix derivatives and unix-likes is catering for a lot of needs very well. We have windows which is non-Unix. I think the onus is on you to show that something else could be better, and better enough that the pain of relearning would be worth it.
      - DagAgren 7y ago
        We are in a dark age at the moment, is what I am saying, and I think we should be working at getting out of it.
zerkten 7y ago
> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. FWIW Chris Harrison (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris_Harrison2 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris_Harrison2) taught a compulsory history of computing class at UMIST in the UK when I was there in 1999-2003. This seems pretty unusual, especially now that I live in the US and understand more about how universities work here.
dekhn 7y ago
I know a bunch of people in the long-term UNIX community and I've always been impresssed that most of them have kept 20+ years of email. This has been helpful in figuring out various historical details.
carapace 7y ago
> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. That is British-grade understatement right there. :)

ethbro 7y ago

Absolutely agreed. It's a shame we talk past each other, when so many answers were already discovered and documented in the past. I try and keep the following in mind (even when my ego fights it). (A) I am very unlikely to be the smartest person who's ever thought about a problem. (B) Even if their technology differed, some parts of their approach are useful. (C) Clues and references pop up in the oddest places, so ears open and notepad ready. (D) Accept references graciously, in the spirit of a gift. (E) Name dropping historical references without providing actual context is always in poor taste.

shrimp_emoji 7y ago
>I try and keep the following in mind (even when my ego fights it). >(A) I am very unlikely to be the smartest person who's ever thought about a problem. My god.
- globuous 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
  - fao_ 7y ago
    I think the person in question is stating that the person they're responding to _shouldn't have to remind themselves of those things_

pvg 7y ago

I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. Why do you feel this way? ACM has had a History of Programming Languages conference since the late 70s where the well known History of Lisp paper was presented. All sorts of popular accounts are, well, popular. Soul of A New Machine was published in '81, Hackers in '84, Accidental Empires in '92, just as a few examples off the top of my head.

ethbro 7y ago
Believe Natales is speaking more to average everydev's state, than the existence of documented history. If history exists, but nobody reads it, then are we not still lost?
- pvg 7y ago
  I mentioned a bunch of popular books, not academic works. One of them had a multi-episode PBS TV show over 20 years ago! Since then, popular accounts of various famous and obscure aspects of industry history, biographies key people, etc have become even more common - I just picked some somewhat older ones.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    Popular with the folks around the office? I don't work in SV, but I like to think I work in a fairly high-skill coding environment. And I regularly have to elaborate on historical references or suggestions.
    - pvg 7y ago
      I'm at a bit of a loss at what to tell you. I feel like we have just about overwhelming evidence that the claim the computer industry is uninterested in its own history is inaccurate. Beyond the tiny smattering of it I've mentioned, that evidence pokes us in the eye every day from the front page of HN. The person who brought this up is apparently too busy to evaluate any evidence and you are telling me the good people at your office know less about computer industry history than you do - a thing that might be as true and as nondispositive about anything ranging from Pokémon to Ming Dynasty Porcelain.

madhadron 7y ago

> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I agree. At the same time, unless you immerse yourself in oral tradition and try to assemble a picture of the diversity of what was going on from it, it's hard to get a sense of what has happened on a scale larger than a particular community, and sometimes not even then. I occasionally think about trying to write a one volume history of computing. > UNIX is foundational to essentially all software-driven technology today, in one way or another. Except Windows, which comes from VMS, which predates Unix. And SQL, which comes from IBM mainframe land. I could probably come up with a few more, but it's late and I'm tired.

WalterGR 7y ago
Lisp comes to mind.
tannhaeuser 7y ago
Also from IBM: Hypervisors/VMs, ancestors of today's containers and SGML, foundation of HTML and XML
cestith 7y ago
Largely agreed, but VMS by no means predates Unix. Unix was in development in 1969, had a manual released inside AT&T in 1971 and was announced publicly in 1973. The first source license was sold in 1975. VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RSX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix (which was developed on the PDP series, first the PDP-7).
- acqq 7y ago
  > Unix (...) first source license was sold in 1975. > VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RTX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix Before VMS there was RSX-11 (note RSX not RTX): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX-11 "From 1971[5] to 1976 the RSX-11M project was spearheaded by noted operating system designer Dave Cutler, then at his first project.[5] Principles first tried in RSX-11M appear also in later designs led by Cutler, DEC's VMS and Microsoft's Windows NT.[6][7][8]" In Dave's words: https://tech-insider.org/windows/research/1992/11.html https://tech-insider.org/windows/research/1992/11.html "RSX-11M was introduced in 1973, 18 months after we started building" Note Dave Cutler and note the years. I'd say the history is comparable.

verisimilitudes 7y ago

That's interesting, because I also feel people don't appreciate computing history appropriately. If you'd care to learn some real history, I suggest you read The UNIX-HATERS Handbook: http://web.mit.edu/%7Esimsong/www/ugh.pdf http://web.mit.edu/%7Esimsong/www/ugh.pdf With this book, you'll learn that UNIX and C are nothing admirable and have actually been responsible for successfully destroying much better systems and languages in the popular eye; languages including Lisp, APL, Simula, ALGOL, Smalltalk, and Forth all existed before C; systems such as ITS and Multics addressed concerns UNIX users still suffer under today. Make no mistake, for all of RMS' admirable qualities, he's basically responsible for UNIX proliferating by copying it for GNU. You also shouldn't look at your modern BSD or GNU system and think this is what UNIX users used decades ago, because for all of their faults, GNU and BSD actually try to produce programs which work correctly and GNU goes much farther than several of the BSDs in this respect. The UNIX attitude is one of getting half the job done and leaving it at that. In closing, UNIX has no philosophy. The UNIX philosophy is simply brand-named simplicity. The ideas of modularity and simplicity predate automatic computing and recorded history, and yet people will claim you're following UNIX if you write a program which adheres to these basic ideals. Further, those other qualities of this philosophy result in programs that aren't modular, simple, nor beautiful.

bitofhope 7y ago
The Handbook is a fine document and any computing history fan worth their salt should read it, but it's hardly the best analysis of Unix in a historical perspective. Blaming (or crediting, however you want to think about it) GNU for proliferation of Unix is anachronistic. RMS has repeatedly said he doesn't care for the design of Unix, but he chose it for the ease of implementation. GNU wasn't even bootable as a stand-alone OS before 1990s and certainly not production ready until Linux was. Using GNU utilities in proprietary Unices was popular, at least since the 90s, but I never heard anyone consider them a "killer app" for Unix.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I used to have a couple of PC World articles about Windows winning the Workstation market, until about GNU/Linux started to be mature enough to allow easy porting of commercial UNIX stuff into them. Had Microsoft and IBM kept serious about their POSIX compatibility subsystems instead of a bullet point to win government contracts, and history would have played out much differently.

msla 7y ago

There's also the unavoidability of narratives, and how they influence what people look up to begin with. For example, there's a Unix history narrative which begins at Bell Labs goes to Berkeley and then out to the world; this is already extremely limited, in that it ignores Wollongong (where the first Unix port was done, to the Interdata/32, and where important work on TCP/IP networking was done) and what AT&T did with Unix after they closed the sources and what the Research Unix people were up to after Seventh Edition, but I think the biggest loss is that it completely sells Multics short: Unix began when Bell Labs left the Multics project, so Multics, in this narrative, is frozen in time as this unfinished thing that Our Heroes are already bailing out of, and that's what gets handed down, as if Multics never progressed an inch beyond 1969. Heck, you can even see this as Myth #1 on the multicians.org site: https://multicians.org/myths.html https://multicians.org/myths.html > 1. Myth: Multics failed in 1969. Bell Labs quit, Multics survived. Now that we can use Multics about as easily as we can use Ancient Unix versions under emulation, you can spin up a perfectly functional 1980s-era Multics and see that, no, really, Multics evolved into something you can do stuff on. That's the problem with narratives: They're both inevitable and inevitably limiting, narrowing the focus to what makes a comprehensible story as opposed to a day-by-day list of what happened. Humans create narratives as naturally, and as unavoidably, as breathing, but we have to be aware of what they do to our comprehension of history.

pjmlp 7y ago
Specially annoying with that narrative, for those that care about computing history, is as C and UNIX are sold as the first of their kind, invented on magic moment, hand-waving what everyone else was doing. Since history belongs to winners, if it wasn't for the accessibility of old conference papers and computer manuals, that would be indeed the only one we had to believe on.
- zantana 7y ago
  I always thought one of the most interesting insights into this was the Unix Haters Handbook https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf especially Dennis Richie's anti forward: The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below. Your judgments are not keen, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome. Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred.

doctor_eval 7y ago

Do you mean DG/UX? That was an awesome OS.

pjmlp 7y ago
Indeed, that is what we used at the campus.
Natales 7y ago
Yes! sorry for the memory lapse.

sacrificedcapon 7y ago

In our industry's defense, our industry is relatively young. In other words, the industry is too busy making history to appreciate it. I'm sure as time passes, we'll start to appreciate the history of the industry more and more.

andreb 7y ago
We like to think that, but we do a lot of rediscovery of techniques and approaches that were invented in the 60s/70s.
KineticLensman 7y ago
> In our industry's defense, our industry is relatively young If we take ENIAC [0] as the first computer (1945), then our industry is 74 years old. Let’s compare this with another tech industry – the aviation industry. The Wright brothers flew in 1903 [1]. 1903 + 74 = 1977. I was a kid in the 1970s, fascinated by aerospace and aviation. There was a massive amount of aviation history around (I still have some of the aviation history books I bought then). So I think there has been plenty of time for the history of computing to appear. Even if we added another 15 years to shift the start of the history of computing (software engineering) at the development of COBOL [2] (approx the same as FORTRAN or LISP), there has still been a lot of time. So I don’t think it’s industry youth / age alone. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL

lizknope 7y ago

The Computer History Museum in San Jose is a great place. I spent an entire day there. They have an excellent YouTube channel with thousands of hours of interviews with important people in the industry. They posted an interview with Brian Kernighan last week. https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTWv-l0JhAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTWv-l0JhAc

sidpatil 7y ago
Slight correction: The Computer History Museum is located in Mountain View.
trenchgun 7y ago
Thanks! I am visiting San Francisco soon and will definitely go check the Computer History Museum.
emplynx 7y ago
These interviews are so good.

DagAgren 7y ago

When it comes to Unix, history and the present are one and the same. We have been locked into the same model, the same OS, for decades now. Unix is being developed through small, incremental changes on top of a base that is massively out of date in 2019. We appreciate history far too much. Unix is holding computing back, and it needs to go. It served its purpose, but it's done. It represent very few of the things that are important to computers in 2019, and it actively hinders many of them. Unix needs be respectfully let to go into retirement, and new things given a chance to replace it finally.

Nursie 7y ago
Let's have this new, wonderful thing or set of things up and running before we retire what we've got, eh?
- DagAgren 7y ago
  We can't, because nobody will even consider giving anything new a chance if it is not Unix.
  - Nursie 7y ago
    So you propose what, that the industry as a whole voluntarilty re-enters the dark ages by throwing away its current crop of systems with no replacement in sight ?! It looks to me like our current crop of unix derivatives and unix-likes is catering for a lot of needs very well. We have windows which is non-Unix. I think the onus is on you to show that something else could be better, and better enough that the pain of relearning would be worth it.
    - DagAgren 7y ago
      We are in a dark age at the moment, is what I am saying, and I think we should be working at getting out of it.

zerkten 7y ago

> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. FWIW Chris Harrison (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris_Harrison2 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris_Harrison2) taught a compulsory history of computing class at UMIST in the UK when I was there in 1999-2003. This seems pretty unusual, especially now that I live in the US and understand more about how universities work here.

dekhn 7y ago

I know a bunch of people in the long-term UNIX community and I've always been impresssed that most of them have kept 20+ years of email. This has been helpful in figuring out various historical details.

carapace 7y ago

> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. That is British-grade understatement right there. :)