
The History of Unix, by Rob Pike [video] - packetslave
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs
======
hhh
This was an absolute treat, and I'd love to see more talks like it.

Huge amount of personality and a long-standing relationship with every topic
and person brought up. I'm happy I got to see it. I hope to personally be able
to talk about modern equivalents of such amazing topics in the future.

Great voice, great topic, great personality (at least what you can ascertain
from a presentation. Worth a listen/viewing.

~~~
danso
Made me think of Brian Kernighan, another Unix guy who’s still kicking and
quite engaging. Googling their names together brought up the fact that the two
authored a 1999 book named “The Practice of Programming”, and then -$30 from
my wallet for the impulse buy.

~~~
vram22
They also authored "The Unix Programming Environment".

~~~
tcard
Both are worth every penny.

They showcase delightfully a way of understanding and writing software, a kind
of down-to-Earth simplicity aesthetics that is usually ditched in favor of
sophistication.

I believe we're mostly past the point of favoring such philosophy (the Go
programming language being maybe the most recent attempt, only partially
successful at it), as it has fallen short of what the world demands from
software, but it remains a very valuable influence.

~~~
vram22
>Both are worth every penny.

Totally agreed. I cut my programming teeth on UPE and the K&R C book (2nd,
ANSI edition), among others. I try to model the command-line tools I write on
the style shown in those two books (Kernighan is a co-author of both); being
doing that for a long time. Here's an example, a tutorial I wrote for IBM
developerWorks - I mentioned it in an HN thread a while ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327807)

>They showcase delightfully a way of understanding and writing software, a
kind of down-to-Earth simplicity aesthetics that is usually ditched in favor
of sophistication.

True.

>I believe we're mostly past the point of favoring such philosophy (the Go
programming language being maybe the most recent attempt, only partially
successful at it), as it has fallen short of what the world demands from
software, but it remains a very valuable influence.

Right, and The Go Programming Language book has Kernighan as a co-author too.

------
mcnichol
What a fantastic talk.

I think there would be a lot of value in capturing a "History of..." type
series from Rob Pike (Alongside other greats).

There is one similar to what I am referring called Web of Stories where they
did this with Donald Knuth.

[https://www.webofstories.com/play/donald.knuth/93](https://www.webofstories.com/play/donald.knuth/93)

------
Aloha
The first time I saw a Blit/5620 and used one, I was amazed - it was like an
alternative development branch of evolutionary development that never fully
developed. I might prefer living in that world where it had however.

The fact that I can get several sessions going on at once, with interactive
data, is fascinating - and all over a relatively slow serial data link too.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
This is a feeling you'll experience a lot looking back on the history of
computing. Sadly, it appears we live in, if not the darkest timeline,
certainly one of the worst.

------
vram22
Related:

Unix History:

[https://www.levenez.com/unix/](https://www.levenez.com/unix/)

------
ChristianBundy
Audio doesn't start until 3:42.

~~~
wging
I opened this earlier, and it linked to
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs&feature=youtu.be&t=226)
\-- I think a moderator may have 'fixed' it in a really silly way.

------
aap_
Great talk and quite a few photos of things I had found photos of before.

------
type0
I wish he would revive the crabs!

~~~
cronix
I guess this is "the first screensaver?" I doubt it saved any screens, but
neither do current screensavers lol.

------
fermienrico
Off-topic: Growing up in the late 80's and going to college in 2000's, I've
always romanticized about places such as Bell Labs and Xero Parc in terms of
their talent pool, innovation and revolutionary ideas. It feels like all the
cool stuff happened 30-40 years ago.

What are some of the modern equivalent of such places?

I can think of Boston Dynamics.

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Amazon, Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX, etc [1]. Just look at what
companies are pumping 10's of billions of R&D dollars into. But, they are
doing some very cool things at Google & some of the X bets. I suspect that's
why Rob Pike is there today. Personally, SpaceX looks like they are also very
much pushing the envelop technically and must be a very cool place to work
[2]. By the way, this was a pretty awesome talk. Rob also helped created UTF-8
& Go [3]. Pretty amazing career.

[1] [https://www.recode.net/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-
dev...](https://www.recode.net/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-development-
rd)

[2] [https://youtu.be/u0-pfzKbh2k?t=19](https://youtu.be/u0-pfzKbh2k?t=19)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike)

~~~
ori_b
> Amazon, Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX, etc [1]. Just look at
> what companies are pumping 10's of billions of R&D dollars into.

What fundamental research are they pumping money into, regardless of imminent
commercial promise? What set Bell Labs apart was the level of fudnamental
"Well, we have no idea where this will go, but we can afford to throw some of
our monopoly money at it" environment.

~~~
coldtea
Xerox Parc fits your question, but the interesting parts of Bell Labs, i.e.
the ones we use today (UNIX, C, etc) wasn't any "fundamental research" either.

~~~
AsyncAwait
> but the interesting parts of Bell Labs, i.e. the ones we use today (UNIX, C,
> etc) wasn't any "fundamental research" either.

What about transistors? Don't we use them today?

~~~
coldtea
We do, but that's not the part of Bell Labs people usually reminisce about in
a programming context or the era TFA talks about.

------
menudo
Is it me, or are there 3:42 (three minutes, forty two seconds) of silence at
the start of the video?

~~~
apetresc
It's a recording of a Google Hangout, which starts recording once the
organizer starts the meeting. But then they waited a while for all the
participants to join up.

