[TUHS] Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>]

On Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024 at 6:53 PM, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

> According to sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au:
> 
> > Developers of Initial Unix arguably were 10x-100x more productive than IBM OS/360, a ‘best practice’ development at the time,
> > so what CSRC did differently is worth close examination.
> 
> 
> Ken Thompson was an astonishingly productive programmer. I don't think
> you can build a business plan that starts with "hire someone like
> Ken."
> 
> One weekend just for fun he pounded out most of an APL interpreter,
> which I then took and spent a month part time adding a few features
> like saving and loading workspaces, and adjusting it to use the APL
> character set on our funky bitmap terminals at Yale. He did more in
> the weekend than I did in the month, and I am not a terrible
> programmer.

To add to the praise, Ken, yourself, and others weren't exactly working on modern 115200 baud terminal emulators and IDEs with all the fancy modern tab completion and automatic linting either.  History has given me an appreciation that these sorts of conveniences work at all.  If I'm ever having a really bad day with my tools, I just think about Ken, Dennis, et. al. hammering away at 33 ASRs making legends happen and suddenly I don't feel so bad.

- Matt G.