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* [TUHS] Re.: Princeton's "Unix: An Oral History": who was in the  team in "The Attic"?
@ 2022-10-11 11:15 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
  2022-10-11 13:48 ` [TUHS] " Larry McVoy
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 26+ messages in thread
From: Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS @ 2022-10-11 11:15 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society


> Has anyone roughly calculated “man years” spent developing Unix to 1973 or 1974?
> Under 25 "man-years”? (person years now)

I cannot find the message at the moment (TUHS mail archive search is not working anymore?), but I recall that Doug McIlroy mentioned on this list that 1973 was a miracle year, where Ken & Dennis wrote and debugged over 100,000 lines of code between them. In software, “man year” is an elastic yardstick...

There is also this anecdote by Andy Herzfeld:

===
Quickdraw, the amazing graphics package written entirely by Bill Atkinson, was at the heart of both Lisa and Macintosh. "How many man-years did it take to write QuickDraw?", the Byte magazine reporter asked Steve [Jobs].

Steve turned to look at Bill. "Bill, how long did you spend writing Quickdraw?"

"Well, I worked on it on and off for four years", Bill replied.

Steve paused for a beat and then turned back to the Byte reporter. "Twenty-four man-years. We invested twenty-four man-years in QuickDraw."

Obviously, Steve figured that one Atkinson year equaled six man years, which may have been a modest estimate.
===

There is also another anecdote involving Atkinson. At some point all Apple programmers had to file a weekly report with how many lines of code they wrote that week. After a productive week of refactoring and optimising, he filed a report saying “minus 2,000 lines”.



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 26+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2022-11-29  7:31 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 26+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2022-10-11 11:15 [TUHS] Re.: Princeton's "Unix: An Oral History": who was in the team in "The Attic"? Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
2022-10-11 13:48 ` [TUHS] " Larry McVoy
2022-10-11 13:59   ` Warner Losh
2022-10-11 19:43     ` Marc Donner
2022-10-11 19:54       ` Larry McVoy
2022-10-11 20:02         ` Michael Kjörling
2022-10-11 20:08           ` Rob Pike
2022-10-11 21:07             ` Dan Cross
2022-10-11 21:41               ` Rob Pike
2022-10-12  6:59             ` arnold
2022-10-12  7:03               ` Michael Kjörling
2022-10-12  7:18                 ` Rich Morin
2022-11-29  7:31               ` Joseph Holsten
2022-10-11 20:10           ` Larry McVoy
2022-10-11 20:14             ` Michael Kjörling
2022-10-11 20:33               ` [TUHS] LOC [was " Charles H Sauer (he/him)
2022-11-07 17:50                 ` [TUHS] " Warner Losh
2022-11-07 19:57                   ` Bakul Shah
2022-11-07 20:11                   ` Dan Cross
2022-11-08 18:55                   ` Marc Donner
2022-11-09  8:41                     ` Dan Cross
2022-11-09  8:49                       ` arnold
2022-11-09 20:17                         ` Dave Horsfall
2022-11-09  9:01                       ` steve jenkin
2022-11-09 10:55                         ` Brad Spencer
2022-11-09 11:56                         ` Stuart Remphrey

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