[TUHS] BWK talk on early Unix Friday 14 January 2022

[TUHS] BWK talk on early Unix Friday 14 January 2022

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I've just watched an interesting presentation given last Friday via
video link to the Linux Conference in Australia:

	Brian Kernighan
	The early days of Unix at Bell Labs
	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E
	48 minutes

While most of the talk subjects are well known to TUHS list members,
there are nice things said about various people, and about the value
of TUHS.

Other talks at the conference may be of interest as well: see the
schedule at

	https://linux.conf.au/schedule/

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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Re: [TUHS] BWK talk on early Unix Friday 14 January 2022

[Rich Morin]

> On Jan 17, 2022, at 13:37, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe@math.utah.edu> wrote:
> 
> I've just watched an interesting presentation given last Friday via
> video link to the Linux Conference in Australia:
> 
> 	Brian Kernighan
> 	The early days of Unix at Bell Labs
> 	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E

I just watched the entire thing; great fun!  I particularly liked the part about pipes and was reminded of dmr's comment:

> ... The idea, explained one afternoon on a blackboard, intrigued us but failed to ignite any immediate action. There were several objections to the idea as put: the infix notation seemed too radical (we were too accustomed to typing ‘cp x y’ to copy x to y); and we were unable to see how to distinguish command parameters from the input or output files. Also, the one-input one-output model of command execution seemed too confining. What a failure of imagination! ...

-- https://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/aosref/ritchie84evolution.pdf

The closing line seems quintessentially Dennis.


On a vaguely related note, I've really enjoyed using pipes in Elixir (borrowed from F#, AFAIK).  In their basic form, they carry only the complete output of the sending function.  However, there is a stream version which works with incomplete data.  Given the sparse nature of C's design, it isn't surprising that pipelines were omitted, but it rather surprises me not to see them in more of its successor languages.

-r

Re: [TUHS] BWK talk on early Unix Friday 14 January 2022

[Douglas McIlroy]

> I've just watched an interesting presentation given last Friday via
> video link to the Linux Conference in Australia:

 >        Brian Kernighan
 >       The early days of Unix at Bell Labs
 >        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E

Here's an earlier incarnation of the talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS-0Vrmok6Y
I rather enjoyed seeing it with closed captions in Spanish and
speakers turned off. Aided by the slides, I was pretty well able to
read the Spanish, which otherwise would have been quite mysterious.

Doug