Tag Archives: Unix

Kernighan Podcast on Unix and C History

Posted on 2022-02-08 by jcs

Here’s a pointer to another interesting talk by Brian Kernighan. This time, it’s a podcast on Unix and C history. The podcast is with CppCast a series specializing on Cpp matters (of course) but that isn’t afraid to venture into … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Early Unix at Bell Labs

Posted on 2022-02-01 by jcs

At the 2022 Linux Conference Australia, Brian Kernighan gave a delightful talk on the early days of Unix at Bell Labs. It’s not so much that Kernighan tells us stories that we haven’t heard before but that he puts everything … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Nerd Talk: Kernighan & McIlroy

Posted on 2022-01-29 by jcs

Everyone with even a tenuous connection to our field knows who Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are. They probably also know who Brian Kernighan is but unless they’re fully immersed in Bell Labs lore they probably don’t know about Doug … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Red Meat Friday: Unix in the Browser

Posted on 2022-01-07 by jcs

No. Just No. Semiserious afterword I get that there’s some great engineering behind this but why would you want to “run” Unix in the browser? And why, in the name of all that’s holy, would you want an OS built … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

V7 and the History of Unix

Posted on 2021-11-28 by jcs

Among Unixheads, the Seventh Edition (V7) holds a special, almost mystical, place. Many consider it the best of the various Unix versions. In his Minix book, Tanenbaum remarks, “It is sometimes said Version 7 was not only an improvement over … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Hole Hawg

Posted on 2021-08-10 by jcs

Do you know what a Hole Hawg is? Neither did I but Neal Stephenson does and he explains it in graphic and amusing detail. Stephenson, of course, is a Science Fiction author responsible for, among other things, the geek paean … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Brian Kernighan on the Birth of Unix

Posted on 2021-07-01 by jcs

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Evolution of Unix

Posted on 2021-06-27 by jcs

I’ve written about Diomidis Spinellis and his wonderful Unix repository before. It’s a single place you can go to get most of the publicly available Unix source code. As I’ve said previously, one of the best ways of becoming a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Sudo

Posted on 2021-05-24 by jcs

Anyone who works in a Unix or Linux environment is familiar with the sudo command. Sudo allows the user to execute a command as root. That’s sometimes necessary even for the most basic users who aren’t operating on a locked … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Unix As Literature

Posted on 2020-11-07 by jcs

Someone has reposted Thomas Scoville’s article from 1998 on Unix as Literature. The article’s premise is that Unix (and these days, Linux) users are different from the users of other systems. That seems like a low calorie assertion but it’s … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment