8 ms·
Ken Thompson recalls Unix's rowdy, lock-picking origins
https://computerhistory.org/blog/a-computing-legend-speaks/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/a-computing-legend-speaks/
The full 4-1/2 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmVHkL0IWk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmVHkL0IWk4
- zabzonk 1y agoback in the days when beards were serious beards
- noir_lord 1y agoWe still have serious beards kicking around. The Linux folks, Andrew Kelley etc all qualify as True Beards.
- paulddraper 1y agoThat’s…sarcasm?
- eesmith 1y agoThe serious beards were a century earlier, when the terms "sideburns" and "mutton chops" were coined, when Dickens had a doorknocker beard, when Thomas Nast drew Uncle Sam with a goatee, and very few men were clean-shaven. One of the early pictures on that page shows Ken Thompson didn't have a beard in the early 1970s.
- constantinum 1y agoKen Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East in 2019 > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o
- retired_account 1y agoLove this one, well worth the watch
- kragen 1y agoI hadn't heard about the stolen security boots. It's interesting that it was resolved by a peer-to-peer negotiated settlement for the security guards to violate official corporate policy, rather than through management.
- nunez 1y agoOkay, so weird and maybe unrelated question. There's this hardcore punk album from 1981 called "This is Boston not LA." On it, there's a track called "Radio UNIX USA" by the FUs. I can't find ANY origin stories about the title. The lyrics have nothing to do with UNIX either, weirdly enough. However, this band is from Boston, and MIT was doing UNIXy stuff at around this time. Anyone have any clue as to the origin for this track?
- retsibsi 1y agoThe lyrics include the lines "But you got / No balls no balls no balls no balls no balls / No balls no balls no balls no balls no balls", so "Unix" is very likely a pun on "eunuchs". I'm not very familiar with US radio station naming conventions, but it seems like 4-letter call signs are common? So the origin could be as simple as converting "eunuchs" to a radio station call sign.
- piperswe 1y agoAll US FM radio station call signs start with either W or K (depending on location, mostly); an acronym starting with U wouldn't look like a call sign at all to me
- nunez 1y agoRight; it would start with a W.
- vaxman 1y agoIf it isn't on the Internet, it didn't happen right? Maybe we can change that... Unix _is_ a play on "eunuchs" but that fact wouldn't have sold well during the mini computer [ https://www.britannica.com/technology/minicomputer https://www.britannica.com/technology/minicomputer ] wars, especially in the later 1980s [ https://youtu.be/IRpKHFfsH3A https://youtu.be/IRpKHFfsH3A ] when Unix was exiting the exclusive world of academia and Bell Labs. This was an era when everyone for the prior thirty years had come up with mainframes and data centers were stocked full of "heavy iron" (IBM and IBM-clones like Amdahl) or at least very large "mini" computers from companies like DEC, which was so well run from the late 1950s on that its leader has been declared to be one of the greatest in the history of Corporate America and was studied at Harvard and Wharton for decades. The Unix technology "specialists" on the other hand were super-nerds: ghastly, feral, mostly pear-shaped, plain clothed technicians only BARELY tolerated in their own settings. [Ok, maybe all of them except Eric Schmidt heh.] Realize that the vast majority of American engineers in the 1980s still wore suits and ties --but not if they had anything to do with Unix. (Ken Olsen fer sure wore suits, but also drove a Ford Pinto, BTW.) When the demo dollies tasked with pushing any number of alternate hardware platforms up against IBM and DEC in the constant battle for those massive "heavy iron" budgets were asked to pitch UNIX (System 3, System V, System 7, BSD) up against bedrock OS/MVS and VMS, at first they would answer the obvious question (of what UNIX stood for) with "UNIX is not UNIX". That pretty much stuck in the period literature (COMPUTER MAGAZINE RAGS) too --no way they were going to answer "eunuchs"! Also worth noting in this context: This was the era of "Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM" and the amount of money your company spent on "iron" was seen as a marker of its success AND YOUR PERSONAL CAREER STATUS in the tech universe, so you can imagine the type of customers and professionals that actually did buy into obscure UNIX-based hardware. This also created a lot of "friction" in the Industry that you can't easily learn about in this Future. It wasn't like today where people have "home labs" and can train themselves to go for whatever job they want using free software (even while sitting in a hellish ghetto of the poorest country on Earth). Back in the day, one was trained on what their school or employer had available (or they learned from carrying around books and imagination, or using X.25-based timeshare if they were lucky). Period. So maybe you landed a great job, but you had to use a shitty Unix computer with broken down terminals or maybe you had a shitty job but they gave you a coveted VAXstation. All your experience with Unix wouldn't buy you much in a DEC or IBM shop and vice versa. The implications this had on the layered applications of the day were profound, but mostly this created a lot of animosity between tech professionals of different backgrounds. There were constant attempts to address this, but the computer hardware manufacturers were complicit in it because it made it easier to lock their customers into one architecture or another. <cue https://youtu.be/ciUfdVs-p84 https://youtu.be/ciUfdVs-p84 > Is it safe to now say that all general purpose operating systems except LINUX are nothing but husks to run LINUX (and whatever legacy ecosystem)? The most successful of all the 1980s demo dollies, The Scott McNealy, took a page out of DEC's playbook and instead of trying to go in with a massive super powerful Unix mini computer, he would pitch a few workstations running something called "SunOS" (BSD eunuchs) that "networked" over TCP/IP to effect "the system is the network" (a totally new concept then) before his company bet everything on a new chip (SPARC) that used RISC architecture to outperform the established industry players and make the guys in charge of those "heavy iron" budgets feel a bit inferior if they didn't buy-in a little. SunOS, SPARC and Solaris definitely caused a lot of disruption, but it really never had much of a chance to unseat IBM or DEC and was also slowly sinking into La Brea tar pit along with everything else (though it had a bit more life due to all the capX as the dot-com bubble was inflating around TCP/IP). IBM had already totally lost control of its maverick PC initiative (by under-estimating Billy The Kid who had also hired away DEC's top VMS engineer) and the ENTIRE market for mini computers (whether they ran OS/MVS, VMS or eunuchs like SunOS or NextStep) totally collapsed. Just the promise that a PC might be as powerful at VMS and could network as well as SunOS was sufficient to change perception and bet corporate budgets on a "computer, not a terminal, for every desk." More importantly, the resulting PC industry economies of scale meant that all of the tech workers could own a "home lab" and, in particular, allowed at least one kid growing up just outside the Soviet Union to go through the pages of Andy Tanenbaum's famous book on operating systems (that demonstrated key concepts for the reader through the creation of a eunuchs operating system Andy called MINIX). Combined with the political antics of a creepy academic communist at MIT and an irresponsible Defense backbone ISP in San Diego, the slow death of all operating systems has manifested (because LINUX ELF binaries and runtime support are now available on IBM mainframes, Windows and as of last June, macOS). Of course, there are still legacy shops, embedded systems and most of the new ELF-running operating systems still run LINUX in nested virtualization, but LINUX has pretty much taken over the game and eunuchs is el muerto. Meanwhile, even the AIs incorrectly think that UNIX is "a playful reference on UNICS, the larger, more complex Multics 'project'" Sounds totally plausible like everything else coming out of an LLM, but we meat bags know better. --- 'Now there were these places called cities and they had the knowin' of a lot of things, they did. They had skyscrapers, videos and sonic.. Then this thing called the Pockey Clips happened and you have to understand, this is Home and there's no Tomorrow Land.' https://youtu.be/rn4aIinTJBQ https://youtu.be/rn4aIinTJBQ
- zkmon 1y agoBirth of a serious change (and leadership) always requires questioning of status quo and probably a bit of rowdy, jungle instincts.
- twotwotwo 1y agoThe early users being patent secretaries, then "administrative kind of stuff, typing in trouble tickets," and adoption spreading because people liked it, is kind of cool. That creates different kinds of pressures than a big top-down-dictated project does, maybe healthy pressures: if you're going to play with a new idea about how things should work you can't break things; you need the thing running reliably for the people using it day-to-day. One way you can have huge projects fail is by fiddling around too long without contact with reality. Given Linux's origins--"(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"--it's interesting that early UNIX, in this telling, was also not the big professional push to build the OS of the future so much as just some folks trying to cobble something useful together (though of course, that they were playing around in Bell Labs gave their experiment some great advantages!).
- kyledrake 1y agoOne of my favorite Ken Thompson hacks is one where he demonstrated how a backdoor could be introduced into a compiler in such a way that it would be difficult to notice https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack
- tizio13 1y agoFor those interested, LaurieWired recently published a video about this very thing. https://youtu.be/Fu3laL5VYdM https://youtu.be/Fu3laL5VYdM
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gbacon 1y agoSee also his Turing Award lecture “Reflections on Trusting Trust.” https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
- jeffrallen 1y agoIf you want to see Ken's contributions to Go, they are all there in Git. There's some fun stuff there (no spoilers). :)
- _joel 1y ago"Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernihgan" is also an excellent read.
- oersted 1y ago> Thompson remembers designing the Unix filesystem on a blackboard in an office with Rudd Canaday — using a special Bell Labs phone number that took dictation and delivered a typed-up transcript the next day. Fancy :), this just became normal for the general public in the last couple of years. I assume of course that there was a secretary at the end of the line, not AI. But it's not completely unthinkable, Bell Labs did do very impressive things in text-to-speech at least.
- HPsquared 1y agoMy thoughts come more fluently as speech than in writing. With writing I'm always wanting to go back and edit, which is distracting.
- embedding-shape 1y agoYeah, something about the ephemeral nature of spoken words that makes it easier to ramble and therefore go into unexpected and more "natural" directions, compared to text which I also have the need to strictly control as I'm typing it. Using dictation for when you really need to not go back and edit is really helpful.
- MobiusHorizons 1y agoBest way I have found to get past this is to break the feedback loop. Easiest was is to type with my eyes closed , or on a system with high latency like epaper or ssh over lte. It forces me to do more work in my head and only use the computer to record it.
- fuzztester 1y ago>But it's not completely unthinkable, Bell Labs did do very impressive things in text-to-speech at least. They did a lot more than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs From the first paragraph at the above page (just for starters): >As a former subsidiary of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), Bell Labs and its researchers have been credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others, throughout the 20th century. Eleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.[1] Also see the section titled Discoveries and developments.
- noufalibrahim 1y agoIt's interesting how so many of the early tools were designed to create "communities" (mesg, talk etc.). The semi open nature of the platform really encouraged it too. It's nice to be able to cd into someone else's home directory and look at their files.
- anthk 1y agoThat's ITS' philosophy and design, not Unix. Every serious Unix server would have every HOME dir with 0700 perms. ITS had no permissions and encouraged collaboration since the beginning.
- Suzuran 1y agoITS had no file permissions, but even before PWORD was installed to keep randoms from the network away there were means of keeping the turists out when the system was to be reserved for Real Work. Other parts of the system that were considered sensitive were hidden behind undocumented commands or program-level passwords - For example, the innards of INQUIR, since the INQUIR database determined who was to be excluded and who was not. There may have been no file permissions, but there was a definite hierarchy of users that was enforced by other (generally more subtle) means.
- BSDobelix 1y agoThen they introduced passwords. However, Stallman insisted that everyone use the same one, you can still boot it: https://github.com/PDP-10/its https://github.com/PDP-10/its
- Suzuran 1y agoThe passwords were only if you were connecting over the network. If you were using a directly attached terminal, you didn't need one. RMS insisted that everyone use their UNAME as their password, but he wasn't widely listened to because the whole reason PWORD came into effect was because turists were getting increasingly destructive. People weren't happy when their mail got marked read (or worse, deleted) because some random from the network had logged in as them simply because they could and did not understand what their automatic login script was doing.
- bonoboTP 1y agoIt's interesting and heartwarming to see how similar the spirit of many successful software projects was. Creative collaboration, open play, extremely high trust, by people who really intrinsically love what they do. It goes against so much of the MBA-worldview and bigcorp offices. Unix, GNU, Linux, early Python, early Rockstar Games etc.
- busfahrer 1y ago> early Rockstar Games I did not expect to see them in this list, can you elaborate?
- aap_ 1y agoAs for Rockstar North/DMA specifically: It was a bunch of nerds making games in Scotland. From having reverse engineered gta3 and vice city and therefore knowing the code of these games quite intimately, i can tell that even at that time (i don't know what exactly was meant by "early") they were still a fairly small bunch of very talented people building the best game together that they could. No huge engines or design patterns, just very straightforward, well or reasonably well written code that does just what's it supposed to. All from scratch, the tooling as well. Of course that's just my interpretation (and maybe i'm projecting a bit) but i imagine it must have been a very fun project for the people involved. Doesn't reek much of management, bureaucracy and questionable practices getting in the way.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- benzible 1y agoIf you enjoyed this, you might check out "Hackers" by Steven Levy. I read it as a kid when I was first getting into programming, and revisited it recently. It really held up for me. The book traces hacker culture from the MIT AI Lab through the Homebrew Computer Club to the early game programmers, and what got me excited then and now is the pure joy of building things in collaboration with like-minded people. I've managed to spend a lot of my career in early stage startups where this is still possible under the right circumstances.
- ggerules 1y agoThanks for posting this! Seriously great book. This is one of those books that I read in the 80s that helped me change career directions to be a programmer in Silicon Valley and eventually get a PhD and teach programming at the university level.
- WarcrimeActual 1y ago[dead]
- benzible 1y agoI haven't read "The Innovators" but I've heard good things about it. However, Isaacson's recent Musk biography was pretty widely acknowledged as being a hagiography, and the NY Times reporters who wrote "Character Limit" about the Twitter takeover revealed that Isaacson was giving Musk advice on Twitter UX and business decisions while supposedly writing an objective biography. I'd definitely recommend "Character Limit" if you're interested in that saga - it's thoroughly reported and includes some wild details about how chaotic and destructive the whole thing was. Reading "Hackers" as a kid, this wasn't quite the tech industry I thought I was signing up for.
- WarcrimeActual 1y agoThat's unfortunate but I won't read anything about musk anyway so it's going to be a dead artist situation for me.
- gbacon 1y agoThe caption under the picture of ken and dmr both standing that attributes to the latter “their motivation was to build a system ‘around which a fellowship could form’” calls to mind quotes from The Lord of the Rings in comments at the top of perl’s source files. For example: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perl.c#L15 https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perl.c#L15