
The Unix System: Making Computers Easier to Use (1982) [video] - shawndumas
http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2014/1/27/ATT-Archives-The-UNIX-System-Making-Computers-Easier-to-Use#.VDvlphuyFfA.hackernews
======
dmix
I'm currently reading The Design of the UNIX Operating System [0], so this is
super interesting for me to watch. I love how he creates a spellchecking
program live, while being filmed.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-UNIX-Operating-
System/dp/01...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-UNIX-Operating-
System/dp/0132017997/)

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bigdubs
Something that occurred to me when I first saw this video is the number of
women featured, I can't say with certainty if I've seen a recent major tech
demo video from a large company feature as many.

~~~
nofinator
This was right around the peak of CS degrees awarded to women: 37% in 1984.

~~~
CalRobert
Thank you for mentioning this - there's a perception that CS and tech has
always been male dominated, but there were plenty of women programmers in the
80's and the field has become even more male-dominated since. It's really
annoying that one of the primary qualifications for tech CEO's is apparently
'be a tall man, ideally white but Asian is OK too'

"In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate
computer science education and the white-collar information technology
workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since"

-[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing)

~~~
maaku
There was, in fact, a point in time when programming was 100% dominated by
women.

~~~
CalRobert
Indeed! At one point a "computer" was a person, and this was also a field
where women were relatively well represented (when compared to other fields
during the same time periods).

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

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larrys
I owned an AT&T 3b2/400 multi user system in 1985 running Unix System V. Came
with a bound set of loose leaf manuals (might have been about 10 of them
iirc). [1]

I learned pretty much everything I needed from those manuals.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLwd32muHwM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLwd32muHwM)

[1] Had about 12 Wyse 30 terminals hooked up to it as well as a Courier 2400
model to be able to dial into it.

~~~
frou_dh
It's weird having never used a real terminal, because while I understand what
it means that Unix is a multi-user system (and have obviously used terminal
emulator programs as well as ssh-ing into servers, etc), the notion of a big
physical box with arrays of dedicated ports that physical terminals plug in to
is really alien.

~~~
larrys
It was really cool and fun even though a simple green terminal screen. I had
one in front of me and one in back of me. The one in back was typically logged
in as root. (Was an office with a lock and a small enough place that I didn't
have to worry about anyone knowing what that was..) Hard drive was 70mb with
4mb of memory. And a tape drive for backup. (System was perhaps 30k in 80's
dollars iirc approx etc.)

That said right now I'm staring at 3 Thunderbolt displays hooked up to a Mac
Pro with over 25 terminal windows going. All in different colors. (Well
actually not different colors for all of them).

But using even the simple green screen was really cool. Definitely got a buzz
using that system.

I remember the first test to show that it was "multi user". I put two of the
terminals next to each other, hit return at the same time, and ran two things
at concurrently. (Might have been ls -Rlt / or something like that.)

~~~
vram22
>Might have been ls -Rlt / or something like that.

Ha, I used to do that sometimes, to make long-running disk I/O happen so that
I could check something or the other that needed the I/O happening.
Redirecting a process's output to /dev/null and putting it in the background
with & can also be useful for many things.

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oimaz
My favorite thing about unix is its philosophy of writing programs that "do
one thing and do it well"

~~~
Someone1234
I like that too, I just wish UNIX IPC pipes had more metadata than throwing
raw strings at one another and hoping the receiving process understands.

I know people are going to roll their eyes at this, but Powershell's IPC
constructs are a step forward. Everything inherits from Object which has the
following prototype:

    
    
         public class Object
         {
         		public Object();
         		public string ToString();    
         		public bool Equals(object obj);
         		public static bool Equals(object objA, object objB);
         		public static bool ReferenceEquals(object objA, object objB);
         		public int GetHashCode();
         		public extern Type GetType();
         } 
    

So if you want to just do strings you still can (string will inherit from type
object, and must implement toString()).

However if you want to do a List<Object> you still can, and better still the
receiving process can use GetType() which has to be implemented, and then have
a few different workflows to handle the type (e.g. List, string, et al).

UNIX was created in 1969(!) so nobody can blame them for designing it the way
they did. However if you were creating UNIX today you'd definitely want to
look at OOP and inheritance as a core pillar.

See this post for this topic: [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/magazine/2007.07.powershe...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/magazine/2007.07.powershell.aspx)

~~~
Crito
I can write *nix command-line utilities with ease in any language that I
please. Can the same be said for powershell utilities? My understanding is
that you are pretty much restricted to using CLR languages.

If we are accepting that sort of languae lock-in, I'd rather get something
like scsh off the ground.

~~~
Someone
That is not language lock-in, it is ABI lock-in, and that is exactly the same
with Unix pipes.

You can complain that the increase in ABI complexity isn't worth the extra
features, but I don't think it is fair to complain about increased ABI
complexity, period.

~~~
Crito
> _" Reading/writing to/from files is a _FAR lower bar than linking with the
> CRL."*

If I want to write a unix utility in C, or Java, or C#, or Lua, or Racket, or
postscript, or brainfuck..., I _can_. Not just in an academic sense, but in a
_" it is actually reasonable and trivial to do so"_ sense. The list of
programming language implementations that cannot read/write to/from files
_(knowledge of the concept of "pipes" is unnecessary, the user's shell opens
those)_ is vanishingly small.

For the average developer who just wants to _use_ Powershell/bash/whatever, it
is absolutely language lock-in.

~~~
pjmlp
It is a common misconception that Powershell is CLR only.

You can also make use of any COM, DCOM, or plain dynamic library in the shell.

There are also text formatters for interoperability with older scripts.

------
shawndumas
rtmpdump -r
rtmp://cp262207.edgefcs.net:80/ondemand/mp4:techchannel/11316/videos/AA13001_UNIX_Making_Computers_Easier.mp4
-o unix-01.flv

------
coppolaemilio
Thanks! I'm a little scared that things haven't change a lot

~~~
angersock
Rob Pike is hilariously bitter on that point.

~~~
s-phi-nl
Can you give an example? That sounds interesting.

~~~
icebraining
[http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-
responds...](http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-
responds?nobeta=1)

See the 10th question.

Also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380288)

~~~
reirob
He seemed to have said: "I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe
does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems."

I would like to hear what exactly was done better in Plan 9 in regards to IPC.
If I recall correctly Plan 9 is open source now - is there more development
going on now or is it stalled?

~~~
ue_
There are forks which are undergoing active development like 9front, although
I don't think anything from Bell Labs is still coming with respect to plan 9.

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lorddoig
There's a wonderfully entertaining moment around the 16 minute mark when
Lorinda Cherry demoes a talking calculator with pipelines. Not satisfied with
it saying "five" after evaluating 8-3, she commands it to raise 2 to the
hundredth power, providing ample time to finish her coffee.

~~~
brianzelip
oh man, I wonder if that talk program was used by Kraftwerk for their great
"Numbers" single,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YPiCeLwh5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YPiCeLwh5o)
? The two audio sources sound similar.

------
bitwize
Try convincing an old VMS hand that Unix is easier to use. VMS's command
interface is aimed at system administrators who haven't had enough coffee and
are prone to making mistakes. Unix is notoriously intolerant of mistakes -- so
nuch so that one fat-fingered keystroke can cause Bad Things to happen.

------
brianzelip
Lorinda Cherry et al's references to "pipelining" and "unix stream processing"
reminds me of the language used to describe Gulp.js and node in general.

------
arjn
Wonderful video. There are a few more intersting ones on that website (AT&T's
archives).

Thanks for posting this.

------
ris
Surprised they managed to get Pink Floyd to do the music.

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nsxwolf
What shell are they using in these demos?

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IBCNU
OG Greybeards omg so hot

------
simula67
I wish they had patented truly novel ideas like pipes, hierarchical file
systems and "everything is a file" and then licensed it so that anyone
releasing software under an open source license can use them and not others.

That would have put an end to others like Microsoft, Apple etc from taking all
these innovations and then further "innovate" with 'phones with rounded edges'
or 'performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data', patent
them and extort money out of free software. Not that there was any way they
could have known that.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I wouldn't say Microsoft or Apple stole these concepts. Patents are horrible.
Those proprietary systems would exist anyway, but without patents, the users
of them can also benefit from these ideas.

Are you aware that Apple's OS X is actually based on the original UNIX source
code? There's nothing proprietary about that.

~~~
FroshKiller
That isn't really true. OS X is based on BSD, which is not "the original
UNIX." The original Unix was closed source and was actually quite proprietary.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
BSD is derived from the original UNIX. There is probably code in OS X that ran
on PDP-11s once.

~~~
ptx
None of the original code is left, though. Mac OS X is based on (for the Unixy
bits) FreeBSD and NetBSD, which are based on 4.4BSD-Lite, which was BSD with
all the AT&T-derived parts chopped off.

See Wikipedia:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#4.4BSD_and_descendants)

