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* [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix
@ 2019-01-05  2:26 Doug McIlroy
  2019-01-05  2:35 ` Ronald Natalie
                   ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2019-01-05  2:26 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

I was given a copy of Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators: How a Group of
Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution". It devotes
ten pages to Stallman and Gnu, Torvalds and Linux, even Tannebaum and
Minix, but never mentions Thompson and Ritchie. Unix is identified only
as a product from Bell Labs from which the others learned something--he
doesn't say what. I have heard also that Isaacson's "Idea Factory"
(about Bell Labs) barely mentions Unix. Is Isaacson blind, biased,
or merely brainwashed?

In the case of Steve Jobs, Isaacson tells not just that the Alto system
from Xerox inspired him, but also who its star creators were: Lampson,
Thacker and Kay. But then he stomps on them: "Once again, the greatest
innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs,
but from the people who applied them usefully." While he very describes
innovation as a continuum from invention through engineering to marketing,
he seems to be more impressed by the later stages.

Or maybe he just likes to tell stories, and didn't pick up all the
good ones about Ken. Isaacson describes spacewar, arguably the first
stage of computer-game innovation, at great length. At the same time,
all he has to say about early-stage operating systems is a single
sentence that credits John McCarthy with leading a time-sharing effort
at MIT. (In my recollection, McCarthy proseletized; Corbato led.) He
tells how ARPANET, which he says was mainly developed by BB&N, connected
time-shared computers, but breathes not a word about Berkeley's work,
without which ARPANET would have been an open circuit.

"Innovators" won general critical praise. A couple of reviews predicted
it would become the standard of the field. However, an evidently
knowledgeable review in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing faulted
it for peddling familiar potted legends without really digging for
deeper insight. Regarding Thompson and Ritchie, it looks more like
overt suppression.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] emacs
@ 2023-08-04  0:04 Will Senn
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread
From: Will Senn @ 2023-08-04  0:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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As a longtime user and lover of ed/ex/vi, I don't know much about emacs, 
but lately I've been using it more (as it seems like any self-respecting 
lisper, has to at least have a passing acquaintance with it). I recently 
went off and got MACLISP running in ITS. As part of that exploration, I 
used EMACS, but not just any old emacs, emacs in it's first incarnation 
as a set of TECO macros. To me, it just seemed like EMACS. I won't bore 
you with the details - imagine lots of control and escape sequences, 
many of which are the same today as then. This was late 70's stuff.

My question for the group is - when did emacs arrive in unix and was it 
a full fledged text editor when it came or was it sitting on top of some 
other subssystem in unix? Was TECO ever on unix?

Will

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2023-08-04  0:05 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 29+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2019-01-05  2:26 [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix Doug McIlroy
2019-01-05  2:35 ` Ronald Natalie
2019-01-05 15:31   ` Larry McVoy
2019-01-05 17:01     ` A. P. Garcia
2019-01-05 20:27       ` Paul Winalski
2019-01-05 21:38         ` A. P. Garcia
2019-01-05 21:51           ` Rob Pike
2019-01-05 21:53             ` Rob Pike
2019-01-05 21:52           ` Larry McVoy
2019-01-06  1:50       ` Chris Hanson
2019-01-06  2:18         ` A. P. Garcia
2019-01-05 17:07     ` Donald ODona
2019-01-05 21:20       ` joe mcguckin
2019-01-06  1:43     ` Chris Hanson
2019-01-06  2:40       ` [TUHS] Emacs (was: Isaacson v Unix) Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2019-01-06  6:01         ` Donald ODona
2019-01-06  6:03           ` Larry McVoy
2019-01-06  6:26         ` Chris Hanson
2019-01-06  7:50         ` [TUHS] Emacs Lars Brinkhoff
2019-01-06 14:23           ` Andrew Luke Nesbit
2019-01-06 14:30             ` Lars Brinkhoff
2019-01-05  9:08 ` [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix William Corcoran
2019-01-05 12:09   ` Ed Carp
2019-01-05 14:15 ` Paul Winalski
2019-01-05 15:01   ` Ed Carp
2019-01-06  4:35 ` Bakul Shah
2019-01-06  4:52   ` Bakul Shah
2019-01-06  5:00   ` Toby Thain
2023-08-04  0:04 [TUHS] emacs Will Senn

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