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The other day I was looking up Unix find command on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_(Unix) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_(Unix)). It lead me
by ontouchstart 3y ago
The other day I was looking up Unix find command on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_(Unix) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_(Unix)). It lead me down a rabbit hole to a project called Programmer's Workbench (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX).
Notable firsts in PWB include:
The Source Code Control System, the first UNIX revision control system, written by Marc J. Rochkind
The remote job entry batch-submission system
The PWB shell, written by John R. Mashey, which preceded Steve Bourne's Bourne shell
The restricted shell (rsh), an option of the PWB shell, used to create widely-available logins for status-checking, trouble-reporting, but made safe by restricting commands
The troff -mm (memorandum) macro package, written by John R. Mashey and Dale W. Smith
Utilities like find, cpio, expr, all three written by Dick Haight, xargs, egrep and fgrep
yacc and lex, which, though not written specifically for PWB, were available outside of Bell Labs for the first time in the PWB distribution
Amazing.
- ontouchstart 3y agoThe PWB might well be called a "human-end" computer; like "front-end" and "back-end" computers, it improves productivity by efficient specialization. - An Introduction to the Programmer's Workbench, T. A. Dolotta and J. R. Mashey