
Stephen Bourne: Early days of Unix and design of sh [video] - mushiake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kEJoWfobpA
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noobermin
Off-topic, but I'm always looking for hour long talks/videos to put on while
I'm cooking and I can't sit at a computer, or my hands are too dirt to finger
a book. Thanks HN for giving me good content! I maintain a list of these and
they come up sufficiently often enough that I always have something to watch
when I have to cook.

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tambourine_man
I've been doing a HN search for youtube|vimeo|video as a poor man's version of
HackerNewsTV for years. Basically with the same goal: having something to
watch while cooking, eating, for siesta or to help me sleep at night

But I'd love a better UI to that data (hint to HN team)

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Walkman
Would be nice to have a ?type=video filter on the URL or something like that

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agumonkey
btw, pdf slides here (first 'slide' link, not the last one):
[http://www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/events/612.en.html](http://www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/events/612.en.html)
([https://archive.is/gforA](https://archive.is/gforA))

ps: Going back even further (multics), Louis Pouzin part in the idea of a
shell
[http://www.multicians.org/shell.html](http://www.multicians.org/shell.html)
([https://archive.is/zVtQ8](https://archive.is/zVtQ8))

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ableal
Damn interesting, that second link on the Multics shell. Thanks for both.

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agumonkey
You're welcome. And just in case you didn't know Louis Pouzin, he also
invented the datagram
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pouzin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pouzin),
a funny fellow :)

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agumonkey
I very recently found about his love for C macros

[http://research.swtch.com/shmacro](http://research.swtch.com/shmacro)

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dalke
Looking at it reminded me of my first C textbook from school; "C as a second
language for native speakers of Pascal". If I recall correctly, it has a
section on macros you can define to make your C code look more like Pascal -
much like how Bourne preferred Algol syntax.

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agumonkey
At which point you wonder if you're writing C code anymore. There's also the
king's way
[http://www.merl.com/publications/docs/TR93-17.pdf](http://www.merl.com/publications/docs/TR93-17.pdf)

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asveikau
I find it pretty amazing what a tight time some of these influential and
lasting designs were implemented in. Bourne joins in 1975 and by the time he
gets to 1977 in the talk there is already so much industry practice
solidified.

How many years have some of us written shell scripts and make files, and here
he is talking about sh and make popping up within 2 years in the 1970s...

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chmaynard
I was eager to watch this video but I found it disappointing. The presentation
was disorganized and unfocused, although Bourne did have some interesting war
stories about Bell Labs. A specialist in writing shells might enjoy this talk,
but there wasn't much value for a generalist like me.

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keithpeter
Cambridge: computer algebra and John Conway's Game of Life on a PDP7. Pretty
good preparation...

...thanks for posting

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101914
Thanks for this.

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bananaboy
He sounds like Arthur C Clarke!

