I just came across some old videos from AT&T about Unix that are worth taking some time to watch. I thought I had written about them before but I couldn’t find any mention of them either locally or on Irreal itself. In 1982, Unix had been around for a bit over a decade, had matured quite a bit, and was being used throughout the Bell system as well as other places. That year, Bell Labs produced two short films, The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive and The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use. They cover the same material and even use some of the same sequences but it’s still worth watching both. AT&T says the first was aimed towards software developers and computer science students. The second was for programmers specifically.
I really enjoyed seeing some of the original Unix developers including an impossibly young Brian Kernighan but also Thompson, Ritchie, Steve Johnson, Lorinda Cherry, John Mashey, and Al Aho. They’re all delightfully nerdy as they describe Unix and how it makes developers’ lives easier.
At one point in both films, Kernighan builds a spell checker by piping together a series of existing programs to do things like splitting text into one word per line, sorting, eliminating duplicates, and checking against an existing dictionary. What was interesting is that although the same commands (more or less) exist today, they had different names. Kernighan used a program called makewords to split the text into words while today we’d probably use tr. What we now know as uniq as called unique and the functionality of comm was implemented in a program called mismatch. Nonetheless, you could build the same pipeline today with any Unix system using the modern versions of the programs Kernighan used.
If you enjoy seeing how things were early in Unix’s life and would like to see what the early researchers looked and sounded like, it’s definitely worth spending a bit of time watching these videos. The first is about 27 and a half minutes and the second is about 23 and a half minutes.