
Ask HN: Book for learning about the history of operating systems and software? - historythrow
I&#x27;m 24, work as a software engineer, and have been programming for about half of my life. While I consider myself reasonably well acquainted with the current state of the operating systems and software, I want to learn about how we arrived at this point.<p>I&#x27;m specifically curious about the development of Unix, popular programming languages, the internet, and Linux. It seems like decisions made decades ago related to each of these still affect my day-to-day work, and I would like to know what these decisions are and how they were made.<p>Does anyone know of a book (or other resource) that I should read to learn more about these topics?
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jonjacky
There aren't many books about this. Instead there are papers that describe
historic systems at particular points in time, or describe (part of) the
history of a particular system.

For programming languages, the canonical papers appeared in the three History
of Programming Languages (HOPL) conferences:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languages)

For Unix and C history, start with Dennis Ritchie's page (scroll down to Unix
papers):

[https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/](https://www.bell-
labs.com/usr/dmr/www/)

For the Internet, there is this review of classic papers on the Internet and
some alternatives:

[http://named-data.net/publications/main/](http://named-
data.net/publications/main/)

There are also some popular books on Internet history - a good one is Where
Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Mathew Lyon.

You might find something interesting among these links on computing history:

[http://jon-jacky.github.io/home/links.html#history](http://jon-
jacky.github.io/home/links.html#history)

and Unix/Linux history (scroll down to Unix heritage society):

[http://jon-jacky.github.io/home/links.html#linux](http://jon-
jacky.github.io/home/links.html#linux)

still more here about Unix and other systems:

[http://jon-jacky.github.io/home/links.html#design-examples](http://jon-
jacky.github.io/home/links.html#design-examples)

Historical descriptions of a few influential systems and many obscure ones:

[https://github.com/jon-
jacky/Piety/blob/master/doc/precursor...](https://github.com/jon-
jacky/Piety/blob/master/doc/precursors.md)

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veddox
ESR's "The Art of Unix Programming" includes a longish section on the history
of Unix. For the rest of the book, he talks about the Unix programming
philosophy, including many examples of real-life software.

I found this a fascinating book to learn about the mindset behind Unix, also
to compare what that mindset was like back in the 70s (and why) and how it is
today.

Well worth reading!

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MarlonPro
Here's a start: "A Brief History of Computing \- Operating Systems"

[http://trillian.randomstuff.org.uk/~stephen/history/timeline...](http://trillian.randomstuff.org.uk/~stephen/history/timeline-
OS.html)

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percept
Based on your question, you might enjoy:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8orjQLacTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8orjQLacTo)

