Irreal has been on an Emacs binge for the last few weeks so here’s a change of pace. This post is about a Computerphile video featuring Brian Kernighan talking about what it was like to work at Bell Labs. Kernighan, is a treasure. Almost everyone in our industry is familiar with him if only as the “K” is K&R, the definitive C book but of course he’s done much more.
People in almost any other industrial setting will be amazed—and jealous—by Kernighan’s description of working life at the Labs. No one told him, or the other staff, what to do. People worked on whatever they found interesting whether or not it had any apparent application to the telephone system. One such project was Unix, which not only didn’t have any immediate corporate use but was essentially a skunk works project, management having lost interest in developing operating systems after their experience with the Multics project.
Interspersed with his description of life at the Labs, Kernighan describes how he came to be at the Labs. A lot of it was luck. That luck culminated in a summer job at the Labs while he was in graduate school at Princeton. That worked out so well for both sides that the Labs offered him a job upon graduation and he didn’t bother interviewing anywhere else.
Kernighan is a master at telling compelling tales about the early Unix days and is always worth a few minutes of our time. This video is no exception. It’s 12 minutes, 31 seconds long so it should be relatively easy to find time for it.