Last Saturday at the Vintage Computer Festival East, Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson sat down and chatted about some Unix history and other interesting events in Thompson’s life. The chat was billed as “Kernighan interviewing Thompson” but it was really more like two old friends sitting down and reminiscing. Happily, there’s a video of the chat.
You don’t often see Thompson in public and I can’t recall ever hearing him say more than a few words so the video is a real treat. He turns out to be an engaging and amusing speaker and, of course, there is no one more qualified to talk about the early days of Unix than he.
He tells the story of how after AT&T withdrew from the Multics project and declared that Bell Labs “would no longer do operating systems” the small group (about 4) of users of the nascent Unix system wanted to move it off the PDP-7 to a larger machine. The request for a new machine was denied because “we don’t do operating systems” so Joe Ossana came up with a fib about them building a word processing system for the Patent Department. That proposal was accepted and Unix was officially under way.
Thompson tells a bunch of other stories, including how he came to work at Bell Labs and a slightly different version of the genesis of grep. The whole thing is an hour and 4 minutes so you’ll definitely need to schedule some time but it’s a great video and you really should watch it. It may be your last chance to hear about early Unix from the people who built it.