
Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan - fjarlq
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1695978552
======
flowerlad
Zero mentions of Solaris. Surprising. BSD, Minix and Linux are mentioned. Even
Santa Cruz Operation is mentioned. Bill Joy and Sun Microsystems are
mentioned. Solaris was the most influential Unix of the 90’s so its omission
is curious.

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
>Solaris was the most influential Unix of the 90’s so its omission is curious.

I think you meant 2000s because in the 90s Solaris was nothing special. All
the interesting stuff (zones, SMF, dtrace, ZFS) was introduced in Solaris 10,
which was released in 2005.

~~~
flowerlad
No I meant the 90’s. Solaris was the top platform for dotcom startups in the
90’s. By 2001-2002 the dotcom crash had happened. By the time the “interesting
stuff” you mention were added, Solaris was waning in popularity.

~~~
ncmncm
True enough. But when it was big, it was nothing special. 2.2 (2, in the final
number scheme) was pretty crashy. One would not expect a Bell Labs person to
find a SysV variant interesting.

As I recall, solarix had Doors by 2001, but I can't remember what it was.

Solarix probably deserves mention if Tru64 nee OSF/1 did. Ah, the Unix Wars:
Sunview vs. Motif, buggy vs. ugly.

~~~
lonelappde
Windows 95 was buggy too, but a history of OSes would be silly to leave it out

~~~
ncmncm
Buggy _and_ ugly. But not Unix.

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pmoriarty
I wish I could see memoirs like this from Ken Thompson and Rob Pike.

~~~
fjarlq
Videos of Ken Thompson and Rob Pike telling Unix history stories:

Ken Thompson (interviewed by Brian Kernighan, 2019, starts after 7m38s):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o#t=7m38s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o#t=7m38s)

Rob Pike (Unix History presentation, 2018, starts after 3m40s):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs#t=3m40s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs#t=3m40s)

~~~
pmoriarty
Thank you soooo much for posting the links to these. I'm just starting to dive
in to the Thompson interview and it's amazing.

I strongly recommend anyone with even a vague interest in UNIX (well,
obviously that would be everyone reading this HN thread) to watch these!

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pjmorris
Rummaging around the local mall bookstore in ~1982, I came upon 'Software
Tools in Pascal', by Kernighan and Plaugher. I fell in love with the ideas,
and the prose. It became the first of what is now a nearly complete collection
of everything Kernighan has published (I don't have the AMPL book, or 'D for
Digital'.) I can't calculate how much I know because of Dr. Kernighan, or how
much my career's course has been altered by the levers he's given me, but it's
a large number.

This is now on my Amazon wish list (How many of you have private lists for
'things to remember and check out later?' Mine's called 'Random Followup
Stuff')

~~~
AnimalMuppet
You might find this interesting, then:
[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-
pasc...](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html)

It's Kernighan's view of Pascal after writing "Software Tools in Pascal". It's
not (as widely perceived) a hit piece on Pascal. It's Kernighan saying "I
wrote the original 'Software Tools' in Ratfor. Rewriting it in Pascal should
have been much easier than it was. Why?"

~~~
pjmorris
I know the piece well. Back when, my university used "Oh, Pascal!" to teach
introductory programming to programmers. For worse reasons than Kernighan, I
never liked that the length of an array was part of the type in Pascal, but,
in retrospect, that might've saved a couple Trillion in buffer overflow
problems.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
At the price of being fundamentally unable to deal with variable-length
arrays? That seems like taking away a rather fundamental ability.

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naikrovek
Amazon is returning a 404 on this item for me, when this post is 6 hours old.
Googling for the book and following amazon.com links gives similar 404 errors.

~~~
kbd
Weird, URL is
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1695978552](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1695978552)
which loads for me.

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jasoneckert
I ordered a copy just now, but was somewhat disappointed that it didn't ship
in tape format.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's a long-proved bound paper-tape format.

------
chrstphrknwtn
Copyright 2020. Spooky.

~~~
maxlybbert
When I was a teenager, I bought a book from a bookstore that had a copyright
date or printing date a month in the future. I was surprised that the date
included the month, and realized the page has been laid out weeks in advance.
But even so, it felt weird to own that book for that first month.

