4 ms·

Is there a good book on Unix history? Something accessible like "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet"?

bch 7y ago
https://www.amazon.ca/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552/ref=mp_s_a_1_1 https://www.amazon.ca/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp...
- yesenadam 7y ago
  Also I found these fascinating: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) has a lot of history and takes you back in time.. http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=unix+haters+handbook http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=unix+haters+handbook 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use (1982) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw 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.
enf 7y ago
Also A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter Salus, https://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:qcu.pdf https://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:q...
- l1k 7y ago
  Thanks for this blast from the past. I bought the book in 1997 as a sophomore student at university. My favorite book at the time. Leafing through the PDF after all these years I came across some gems I hadn't appreciated back then: On page 161 the author mentions in passing that Eric Schmidt had been working on BerkNet. THE Eric Schmidt. The Google Eric Schmidt. Earlier the book mentions that Bill Joy was able to hire a developer with money they got from DARPA. That developer was Michael Toy and later Sam Leffler. There's a movie called Code Rush about the open-sourcing of Netscape's source code in 1998 (which begat Mozilla and Firefox) and Michael Toy was the project lead for the open source effort back then. Sam Leffler later developed TIFF.
invsblduck 7y ago
Not a history book, per se, but a great tour into the culture and philosophy of Unix: The Art of Unix Programming [1], by Eric Raymond. Chapter 2 is titled "History." You also have resources like The Unix Heritage Society [2], who show a timeline of historic events on their wiki [3]. I bought Brian Kernighan's memoir [4], which so far is an incredibly detailed and personal account of his time at BTL. [1] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ [2] https://www.tuhs.org/ https://www.tuhs.org/ [3] https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=events:start https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=events:start [4] https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552/ https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...

bch 7y ago

https://www.amazon.ca/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552/ref=mp_s_a_1_1 https://www.amazon.ca/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp...

yesenadam 7y ago
Also I found these fascinating: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) has a lot of history and takes you back in time.. http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=unix+haters+handbook http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=unix+haters+handbook 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use (1982) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw 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.

enf 7y ago

Also A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter Salus, https://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:qcu.pdf https://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:q...

l1k 7y ago
Thanks for this blast from the past. I bought the book in 1997 as a sophomore student at university. My favorite book at the time. Leafing through the PDF after all these years I came across some gems I hadn't appreciated back then: On page 161 the author mentions in passing that Eric Schmidt had been working on BerkNet. THE Eric Schmidt. The Google Eric Schmidt. Earlier the book mentions that Bill Joy was able to hire a developer with money they got from DARPA. That developer was Michael Toy and later Sam Leffler. There's a movie called Code Rush about the open-sourcing of Netscape's source code in 1998 (which begat Mozilla and Firefox) and Michael Toy was the project lead for the open source effort back then. Sam Leffler later developed TIFF.

invsblduck 7y ago

Not a history book, per se, but a great tour into the culture and philosophy of Unix: The Art of Unix Programming [1], by Eric Raymond. Chapter 2 is titled "History." You also have resources like The Unix Heritage Society [2], who show a timeline of historic events on their wiki [3]. I bought Brian Kernighan's memoir [4], which so far is an incredibly detailed and personal account of his time at BTL. [1] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ [2] https://www.tuhs.org/ https://www.tuhs.org/ [3] https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=events:start https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=events:start [4] https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552/ https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...