4 ms·

My summer at Bell Labs (2018)

61 points by hasheddan 5y ago

jleyank 5y ago
It was amazing when computers were both new and social. Limitless potential pursued through room-sided machines with the power of today’s toys. Bits and scraps like this blog capture the spirit.
- spyremeown 5y ago
  Yea, it seemed all so new and joyful. People were still able to grasp the full software complexity and really make the best out of it. I miss this time I never got to live, weirdly enough.
  - jleyank 5y ago
    If you are too young to have been there, make sure Linux always has some of the same vibes as Unix and earlier. It’s not just money, it’s “being known” and more importantly “being useful” that is the mark of a hacker.
  - linguae 5y ago
    Thankfully there are some retrocomputing and hobbyist groups online that maintain this spirit of computing. I was born in 1989 and was fortunate enough to be exposed to computers at an early age, and so I was able to live through a time when computers felt new and before "pop culture" (as Alan Kay would put it) and other commercial concerns took over computing. Some areas where I spend a lot of my browsing time are Mac and NeXT retrocomputing sites as well as keeping up to date with the Smalltalk, Lisp, and Plan 9 communities.
thekiptxt 5y ago
This is so cool. I’m a few years out of college at a major tech company and have taken to reading some books about this era. I find myself envious of the seeming purity of the time when it was all getting started, and notice how scrum boards, discussions of negotiating TC are absent in these stories. I don’t remember an Internet without Facebook. To me, Ritchie is a legend, Ullman was someone who wrote some of my textbooks. To hear an account of an intern working side by side with some of these people is amusingly bizarre.
aj7 5y ago
https://akapugsblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/center127.pdf https://akapugsblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/center127.pd... is fascinating. Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, Aho, reporting to obscure people adjudged by even more obscure people to be worthy of management. It would be about 23 years before engineers would be paid much more than subway motorman with seniority and a strong union. Note also that in that era, it was de rigueur to describe the marital status of every female support person.

61 points by hasheddan 5y ago

It was amazing when computers were both new and social. Limitless potential pursued through room-sided machines with the power of today’s toys. Bits and scraps like this blog capture the spirit.

spyremeown 5y ago
Yea, it seemed all so new and joyful. People were still able to grasp the full software complexity and really make the best out of it. I miss this time I never got to live, weirdly enough.
- jleyank 5y ago
  If you are too young to have been there, make sure Linux always has some of the same vibes as Unix and earlier. It’s not just money, it’s “being known” and more importantly “being useful” that is the mark of a hacker.
- linguae 5y ago
  Thankfully there are some retrocomputing and hobbyist groups online that maintain this spirit of computing. I was born in 1989 and was fortunate enough to be exposed to computers at an early age, and so I was able to live through a time when computers felt new and before "pop culture" (as Alan Kay would put it) and other commercial concerns took over computing. Some areas where I spend a lot of my browsing time are Mac and NeXT retrocomputing sites as well as keeping up to date with the Smalltalk, Lisp, and Plan 9 communities.

thekiptxt 5y ago

This is so cool. I’m a few years out of college at a major tech company and have taken to reading some books about this era. I find myself envious of the seeming purity of the time when it was all getting started, and notice how scrum boards, discussions of negotiating TC are absent in these stories. I don’t remember an Internet without Facebook. To me, Ritchie is a legend, Ullman was someone who wrote some of my textbooks. To hear an account of an intern working side by side with some of these people is amusingly bizarre.

aj7 5y ago

https://akapugsblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/center127.pdf https://akapugsblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/center127.pd... is fascinating. Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, Aho, reporting to obscure people adjudged by even more obscure people to be worthy of management. It would be about 23 years before engineers would be paid much more than subway motorman with seniority and a strong union. Note also that in that era, it was de rigueur to describe the marital status of every female support person.