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The Dream Machine [1] gave me a deeper appreciation for how timesharing influenced Unix. Of course I've heard that idea before but never really thought much abo

The Dream Machine [1] gave me a deeper appreciation for how timesharing influenced Unix. Of course I've heard that idea before but never really thought much about the details. Commands like `who` which are frankly kinda useless for me are a lot more interesting and useful back in a timesharing context. E.g. `who` lets you see who else is currently logged on to the timeshared computer, and then you could use another program (I forget the name... `mail`?) to basically DM that person. [1] This book was a slog for me. I know a lot of people here love it but it was like 2 months of tedium for me.

aldto 2y ago
"write" was used to DM a person. And "mesg" was used to enable/disable messages from being displayed if you didn't want to be disturbed. I used this a lot earlier in my career. Later came "talk" which gave a fancy split screen chat session.
- ajross 2y ago
  > "write" was used to DM a person. Notably, it did so by literally opening up the tty associated with the user's session and spitting bytes directly at it. It was a different world back then.
  - kps 2y ago
    `stty 0 </dev/ttyxx` was briefly popular when I was in school (although setting an incorrect but nonzero baud rate would probably have been more annoying).
layer8 2y ago
You might mean talk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software) We used Unix machines in that multi-user way in the 1990s at university. The benefits were similar to the Cloud today: You could log on from everywhere and have your familiar environment and data there. Thanks to NFS, your files could be the same between different machines.