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The Unix System: Making Computers Easier to Use (1982) [video]
- shawndumas 12y agortmpdump -r rtmp://cp262207.edgefcs.net:80/ondemand/mp4:techchannel/11316/videos/AA13001_UNIX_Making_Computers_Easier.mp4 -o unix-01.flv
- coppolaemilio 12y agoThanks! I'm a little scared that things haven't change a lot
- angersock 12y agoRob Pike is hilariously bitter on that point.
- s-phi-nl 12y agoCan you give an example? That sounds interesting.
- icebraining 12y agohttp://slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds?nobeta=1 http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds... See the 10th question. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380288
- reirob 12y agoHe seemed to have said: "I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems." I would like to hear what exactly was done better in Plan 9 in regards to IPC. If I recall correctly Plan 9 is open source now - is there more development going on now or is it stalled?
- ue_ 12y agoThere are forks which are undergoing active development like 9front, although I don't think anything from Bell Labs is still coming with respect to plan 9.
- peterkelly 12y ago"Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" by Rob Pike http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf There's some pretty brutal truths here.
- pjmlp 12y agoThat is what happens when you get almost a UNIX mono-culture between desktop and server, killing almost all other alternatives that existed. Nowadays, the only places where OS research seems to be alive is in cloud, embedded and real time OSs.
- dmix 12y agoI'm currently reading The Design of the UNIX Operating System [0], so this is super interesting for me to watch. I love how he creates a spellchecking program live, while being filmed. [0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-UNIX-Operating-System/dp/0132017997/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-UNIX-Operating-System/dp/01...
- simula67 12y agoI wish they had patented truly novel ideas like pipes, hierarchical file systems and "everything is a file" and then licensed it so that anyone releasing software under an open source license can use them and not others. That would have put an end to others like Microsoft, Apple etc from taking all these innovations and then further "innovate" with 'phones with rounded edges' or 'performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data', patent them and extort money out of free software. Not that there was any way they could have known that.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoI wouldn't say Microsoft or Apple stole these concepts. Patents are horrible. Those proprietary systems would exist anyway, but without patents, the users of them can also benefit from these ideas. Are you aware that Apple's OS X is actually based on the original UNIX source code? There's nothing proprietary about that.
- FroshKiller 12y agoThat isn't really true. OS X is based on BSD, which is not "the original UNIX." The original Unix was closed source and was actually quite proprietary.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoBSD is derived from the original UNIX. There is probably code in OS X that ran on PDP-11s once.
- ptx 12y agoNone of the original code is left, though. Mac OS X is based on (for the Unixy bits) FreeBSD and NetBSD, which are based on 4.4BSD-Lite, which was BSD with all the AT&T-derived parts chopped off. See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#4.4BSD_and_descendants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#...
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- larrys 12y agoI owned an AT&T 3b2/400 multi user system in 1985 running Unix System V. Came with a bound set of loose leaf manuals (might have been about 10 of them iirc). [1] I learned pretty much everything I needed from those manuals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLwd32muHwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLwd32muHwM [1] Had about 12 Wyse 30 terminals hooked up to it as well as a Courier 2400 model to be able to dial into it.
- frou_dh 12y agoIt's weird having never used a real terminal, because while I understand what it means that Unix is a multi-user system (and have obviously used terminal emulator programs as well as ssh-ing into servers, etc), the notion of a big physical box with arrays of dedicated ports that physical terminals plug in to is really alien.
- larrys 12y agoIt was really cool and fun even though a simple green terminal screen. I had one in front of me and one in back of me. The one in back was typically logged in as root. (Was an office with a lock and a small enough place that I didn't have to worry about anyone knowing what that was..) Hard drive was 70mb with 4mb of memory. And a tape drive for backup. (System was perhaps 30k in 80's dollars iirc approx etc.) That said right now I'm staring at 3 Thunderbolt displays hooked up to a Mac Pro with over 25 terminal windows going. All in different colors. (Well actually not different colors for all of them). But using even the simple green screen was really cool. Definitely got a buzz using that system. I remember the first test to show that it was "multi user". I put two of the terminals next to each other, hit return at the same time, and ran two things at concurrently. (Might have been ls -Rlt / or something like that.)
- vram22 12y ago>Might have been ls -Rlt / or something like that. Ha, I used to do that sometimes, to make long-running disk I/O happen so that I could check something or the other that needed the I/O happening. Redirecting a process's output to /dev/null and putting it in the background with & can also be useful for many things.
- lorddoig 12y agoThere's a wonderfully entertaining moment around the 16 minute mark when Lorinda Cherry demoes a talking calculator with pipelines. Not satisfied with it saying "five" after evaluating 8-3, she commands it to raise 2 to the hundredth power, providing ample time to finish her coffee.
- brianzelip 12y agooh man, I wonder if that talk program was used by Kraftwerk for their great "Numbers" single, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YPiCeLwh5o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YPiCeLwh5o ? The two audio sources sound similar.
- bigdubs 12y agoSomething that occurred to me when I first saw this video is the number of women featured, I can't say with certainty if I've seen a recent major tech demo video from a large company feature as many.
- jimktrains2 12y agoI noticed the same thing when watching the SICP lectures (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PL8FE88AA54363BC46 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PL8FE88AA54...)
- larrys 12y agoOne of the women, Lorinda Cherry raced rally cars as a hobby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorinda_Cherry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorinda_Cherry Here's an interview with her that I just dug up: http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/cherry.htm http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/cherry.htm
- nofinator 12y agoThis was right around the peak of CS degrees awarded to women: 37% in 1984.
- CalRobert 12y agoThank you for mentioning this - there's a perception that CS and tech has always been male dominated, but there were plenty of women programmers in the 80's and the field has become even more male-dominated since. It's really annoying that one of the primary qualifications for tech CEO's is apparently 'be a tall man, ideally white but Asian is OK too' "In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since" -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing
- maaku 12y agoThere was, in fact, a point in time when programming was 100% dominated by women.
- oimaz 12y agoMy favorite thing about unix is its philosophy of writing programs that "do one thing and do it well"
- Someone1234 12y agoI like that too, I just wish UNIX IPC pipes had more metadata than throwing raw strings at one another and hoping the receiving process understands. I know people are going to roll their eyes at this, but Powershell's IPC constructs are a step forward. Everything inherits from Object which has the following prototype: public class Object { public Object(); public string ToString(); public bool Equals(object obj); public static bool Equals(object objA, object objB); public static bool ReferenceEquals(object objA, object objB); public int GetHashCode(); public extern Type GetType(); } So if you want to just do strings you still can (string will inherit from type object, and must implement toString()). However if you want to do a List<Object> you still can, and better still the receiving process can use GetType() which has to be implemented, and then have a few different workflows to handle the type (e.g. List, string, et al). UNIX was created in 1969(!) so nobody can blame them for designing it the way they did. However if you were creating UNIX today you'd definitely want to look at OOP and inheritance as a core pillar. See this post for this topic: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2007.07.powershell.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2007.07.powershe...
- Crito 12y agoI can write *nix command-line utilities with ease in any language that I please. Can the same be said for powershell utilities? My understanding is that you are pretty much restricted to using CLR languages. If we are accepting that sort of languae lock-in, I'd rather get something like scsh off the ground.
- Arnavion 12y agoPowerShell utilities are implemented as CLR classes inheriting from a particular base class. As such, they must be written in a CLR language (or PowerShell itself, of course). Edit: Of course, you have the option of writing a minimal wrapper in PS that shells out to your other-language command but the interface between PS and non-PS programs is still based on a string commandline.
- IBCNU 12y agoOG Greybeards omg so hot
- brianzelip 12y agoLorinda Cherry et al's references to "pipelining" and "unix stream processing" reminds me of the language used to describe Gulp.js and node in general.
- ris 12y agoSurprised they managed to get Pink Floyd to do the music.
- nsxwolf 12y agoWhat shell are they using in these demos?
- bitwize 12y agoTry convincing an old VMS hand that Unix is easier to use. VMS's command interface is aimed at system administrators who haven't had enough coffee and are prone to making mistakes. Unix is notoriously intolerant of mistakes -- so nuch so that one fat-fingered keystroke can cause Bad Things to happen.
- arjn 12y agoWonderful video. There are a few more intersting ones on that website (AT&T's archives). Thanks for posting this.