
The Unix Operating System (1982) [video] - otagekki
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
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dang
Submitted like 30 times but mostly with no comments, except in 2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830478)

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m_sahaf
It's interesting how the home directories were under /usr during that era. If
you notice at 13:35, when Brian runs `pwd`, he's at `/usr/bwk` and he says:
"that's where I start when I login." Is there any history behind the shift? Or
is it just a Linux idiosyncrasy?

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qntty
Here's a little bit of the history:

[http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...](http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html)

 _When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack
(their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where
all the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr).
They replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib,
/tmp...) and wrote files to those new directories because their original disk
was out of space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and
relocated all the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the
space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!)._

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lakkal
That crunchy sound of the VT1xx terminal and the other keyboards in this video
are giving me an intense feeling of nostalgia.

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modmans2nd
I love that video. I’ve seen it 5 times and every time I have to watch the
whole thing.

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smabie
What commands is Kernighan using in his spell checker example? makewords?
lowercase? unique? mismatch? Were these really commands in AT&T unix? I kind
of suspect that they created some "unique" shell scripts for this video to
make it easier to understand..

His full command is:

$ makewords sentence | lowercase | sort | unique | mismatch

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anthk
makewords -> tr ' ' '\n'

unique -> uniq

lowercase is easy, tr a-z A-Z

mismatch -> loop and grep over the wordlist and check if the output on non-
zero (no match), print that word. A trivial script. (while read line ; do if
(grep -q "$line" /usr/share/dict/words) ; then ... )

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smabie
Yeah, of course. But why is this video claiming they are Unix commands when
they are not? Are these just little shell scripts designed for the camera?

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LeoPanthera
Maybe the idea is that every shell script compromised of existing, simpler
commands, is automatically itself a "command" in UNIX. Obvious and simple
today, but not a common concept when this video was made.

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TomMarius
Wasn't that the same in operating systems like MS-DOS and its predecessors,
and on Apple computers as well?

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nineteen999
Well yeah I guess if you are thinking in terms of batch scripts, but DOS
didn't exist until 1980, and UNIX had already been doing this within a
multiuser, multitasking environment since at least 1972.

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TomMarius
Oh, my bad, I confused the decade.

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ferzul
what were pre-unix file systems like? it sounds like storing bytes in a file
in a directory which is a kind of file was innovative, but it's effectively
all there is today!

i know old macs had various attributes - e.g. you could store the owner of an
file so when you opened it, it would run in the program that generated it, not
necessarily the default for files of this type. but is that the alternaitive
he had in mind?

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mork5zid
In other operating systems, files had fixed-length records or were key-value
stores.

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BracketMaster
Saw that a year back. Thanks ATT for preserving this.

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otagekki
Talk on Unix philosophy, Shell, pipes

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combatentropy
featuring Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson.

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Lex-2008
I like how back than they called shell scripts "shell sequences"

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zozbot234
That term was used on Amiga as well, though (AFAICT) it was not common
elsewhere. The default boot mechanism runs the Shell script 'startup-
sequence', found in the root-level directory 'S' of the boot drive.

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geoffbp
Somehow haven't seen this before. Thanks!

