Tag Archives: Unix

While researching for my post The History of C Compilers, I came across another post from Diego Crespo that was sort of along the same lines. This one, Tracing the Lines: From the Telephone to Unix, follows the early history … Continue reading →

There are lots of people who enjoy the opportunity to experience what it was like to work on early Unix systems. That’s been possible for a long time. Indeed, there’s a cottage industry of experimenters who have built PDP emulators, … Continue reading →

After yesterday’s post on Thompson’s famous hack, I watched the video of Thompson’s talk at this year’s Southern California Linux Expo that Cox mentioned. That was pretty interesting as another example of Thompson’s curiosity and genius but the point for … Continue reading →

Every year or so I revisit and write about Ken Thompson’s 1983 Turing Award lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust. It’s one of those papers that should be read every year: it seems there’s always something new to learn. The paper … Continue reading →

Perhaps I’m just old fashioned and pining for the old days. Or perhaps I’m anticipating the time when I can finally wave my cane at all those pesky kids. Whatever the case, I do believe that avoiding the command line—or … Continue reading →

Dr Drang over at And now it’s all this has an interesting post on the Unix rs command and his use case for it. The “rs” stands for “reshape”. The idea is that given some data arranged in rows and … Continue reading →