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 take for granted: operating systems, programming languages, they all have to come from somewhere. In the 1960s, that somewhere was Bell Labs, and the operating system they were building was Unix. They were building more than just an operating system though. They were building a way to work with computers that had never existed before.
That’s telling, I think, because we take the Unix model so much for granted today but back in the 60’s and early 70’s it was all about punched cards, Fortran, and waiting half a day to get the results of your program run back.
Unix famously grew out of the desire on the part of Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and a few others to recapture the comfortable programming environment they’d experienced while working on Multics. In the beginning, Unix was very much a skunk works project that was developed on an unused and forgotten PDP-7. The Unix engineers basically conned AT&T management into formalizing the development by promising a word processing system for the Patent Department.
The interview is long, which is one of the things that makes it so useful because it leaves plenty of time for revealing vignettes. One of the recurring themes is what a genius programmer Ken Thompson is. In one story Kernighan tells how he, Thompson, and Joe Condon were puzzling over how to figure out how their new typesetter worked. They didn’t have source code for the program that ran it but they did have the binary. Kernighan took a dinner break and when he came back, Thompson had written a disassembler. Then, of course, he wrote an assembler for the minicomputer that ran the typesetter so they could produce their own program for it. There’s more like that in the interview.
The text is a transcript of a podcast so you can listen if you’d rather. There’s a button on the page for playing it in case you want to listen.