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Categories
Meta
Tag Archives: Unix
Red Meat Friday: Unix in the Browser
No. Just No. Semiserious afterword I get that there’s some great engineering behind this but why would you want to “run” Unix in the browser? And why, in the name of all that’s holy, would you want an OS built … Continue reading
V7 and the History of Unix
Among Unixheads, the Seventh Edition (V7) holds a special, almost mystical, place. Many consider it the best of the various Unix versions. In his Minix book, Tanenbaum remarks, “It is sometimes said Version 7 was not only an improvement over … Continue reading
The Hole Hawg
Do you know what a Hole Hawg is? Neither did I but Neal Stephenson does and he explains it in graphic and amusing detail. Stephenson, of course, is a Science Fiction author responsible for, among other things, the geek paean … Continue reading
Brian Kernighan on the Birth of Unix
Over at CoRecursive they have a really excellent interview with Brian Kernighan on the birth of Unix. The interview starts out with this quote from Adam, the interviewer: When you work on your computer, there are so many things you … Continue reading
The Evolution of Unix
I’ve written about Diomidis Spinellis and his wonderful Unix repository before. It’s a single place you can go to get most of the publicly available Unix source code. As I’ve said previously, one of the best ways of becoming a … Continue reading
Sudo
Anyone who works in a Unix or Linux environment is familiar with the sudo command. Sudo allows the user to execute a command as root. That’s sometimes necessary even for the most basic users who aren’t operating on a locked … Continue reading
Unix As Literature
Someone has reposted Thomas Scoville’s article from 1998 on Unix as Literature. The article’s premise is that Unix (and these days, Linux) users are different from the users of other systems. That seems like a low calorie assertion but it’s … Continue reading
Unix Pipes
This post is a blast from the past \(\times 2\). One reason it’s a blast from the past is that it discusses the Unix V6 code. The other reason is that it discusses some of the code that first helped … Continue reading
You Are Not Expected to Understand This Redux
Three and a half years ago, I wrote about what is arguably the most famous comment in computer history. That, of course, is the celebrated “You are not expected to understand this” comment in the V6 Unix source code. The … Continue reading
The 500 Mile Email
I vaguely remember writing about this before but I just saw a reference to it and it’s such a great story that it should be repeated every few years. Trey Harris tells a funny and instructive tale about how even … Continue reading