Rob Pike gave an really nice talk on Unix hisotry as he experienced it. If you’re a Unix-head you already know who Pike is. If not, Pike was one of the researchers at Bell Labs who worked on Unix and Plan9. He’s the coauthor (with Brian Kernighan) of The Unix Programming Environment, which is still in print after 35 years. He also famously designed UTF-8 on a placemat over dinner with Ken Thompson. His software projects include the Sam and Acme program editors and, more recently, the Go programming language which he developed with Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer at Google.
One of the parts of his talk that I especially enjoyed was his discussion of the ed editor. It’s easy to dismiss it today as a primitive line editor but Pike says that at the time it was so much better than anything else it seemed like a miracle.
The video is an hour and 37 seconds so you’ll have to find a spare hour to watch it. The video displays the title screen for almost 4 minutes so you’ll probably want to skip to the 3:45 point to watch it. As I said, it’s a very nice video and you’ll definitely want to watch it.