
AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System - yror10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
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TazeTSchnitzel
RIP Dennis Ritchie. We all owe a great debt to you.

Heck, here I sit typing this in Firefox, written in C++, a derivative of C, on
OS X, a derivative of the UNIX system. I have a Terminal open with which I am
compiling PHP, written in C. His works are still relevant to today's world
beyond the grave.

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umeshunni
The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind when watching
the video.

I wonder if Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie even imagined at
the time that their creation will still be carried in the pockets of over a
billion people 30 years later.

~~~
NAFV_P
> _The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind when
> watching the video._

Isaac Newton used the same phrase, but it was suspected he was referring to
the short stature of his contemporary Robert Hooke.

Ritchie seemed down to earth, unassuming and hard working. That is why I am
fond of him.

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ineedtosleep
I don't know why it just happened now, but it finally dawned on me after
seeing the video's kernel/shell/utilities graphic: the shell is a wrapper
around the kernel.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Well... the shell is a layer above the syscall functions which are a layer
above the kernel :)

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NAFV_P
The other film:

"The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use"

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

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omnibrain
I found the old Episodes of Computer Chronicles on Unix interesting to watch:
[https://archive.org/details/UNIX1985](https://archive.org/details/UNIX1985)
and [https://archive.org/details/unix_2](https://archive.org/details/unix_2)

Totally unrelated: Gary Kildall comes across as if he's been a really nice
guy. Poor guy. :(

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woah
Lots of female developers in this video. What happened?

~~~
noobermin
I was going to mention that. I could recognize Dennis Ritchie, Brian
Kernighan, and Ken Thompson, but I have never heard of Lorinda Cherry [1].
Apparently, I should have, because she essentially inspired gnu plot utils,
which must have had some influence on future plot utilities(?)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorinda_Cherry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorinda_Cherry)

edit: made a correction, oops

~~~
LukeShu
I don't know that gnuplot _wasn 't_ inspired by her work (it might have been).
The wiki article you linked mentions GNU plotutils, which is different than
gnuplot (gnuplot is not affiliated with GNU).

~~~
noobermin
Right you are, made an edit.

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NAFV_P
Looking at the wikipedia article on Ritchie, I found this photo of attendees
of the 1984 Usenix Conference [0].

At the bottom of the page it points out some faces. There is a tall guy to
Dennis' right, named as Erik Fair (not familiar with him, I'll admit) but he
looks a lot like Larry Wall.

The only other face I recognised was Peter Langston, it demonstrates how
little is known by the general public (including myself) about the
contributions of all these people to CS.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usenix84_1.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usenix84_1.jpg)

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NAFV_P
At exactly 7 minutes into the video, you glimpse Brian Kernighan's pair of
walking boots, sporting some fabulous purple bootstraps.

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subdane
I find this far more compelling for anthropological reasons than technical
ones.

~~~
jimbokun
I couldn't possibly disagree more.

The composition of programs through pipes remains a brilliant idea, and an
extremely effective way to get a job done. I've lost track of the number of
times I've heard a new programming tool described as "It's like Unix pipes
for..."

C is still a remarkably popular programming language, and it has proven
surprisingly hard to invent a new language that's better than C in every
respect.

Many people could benefit from the ability to connect multiple programs in the
shell to get a job done, even if they're not programmers.

It's hard for me to think of any computer scientists whose work remains as
relevant today as the people in this video.

~~~
pjmlp
> The composition of programs through pipes remains a brilliant idea, and an
> extremely effective way to get a job done

Except pipes were already present in another operating systems at the time,
[http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html](http://cm.bell-
labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html)

> C is still a remarkably popular programming language, and it has proven
> surprisingly hard to invent a new language that's better than C in every
> respect.

In 70's already had a few system programming languages better than C in every
respect, safety, modularization, thread support, low level programming, you
name it.

C's widespread into the industry is a consequence of UNIX adoption by the
industry.

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kasperset
Also nice to see Alfred Aho(One of the creators of Awk).

