HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

This video of the UNIX OS: https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0

Was just showing the subject to a youngster recently. Other folks mentioned the Code book, I liked that one. The MMM by Brooks of course. We also looked at the following videos on youtube/Kanopy and other places:

- The Story of Math(s) by Marcus du Sautoy to set the stage... school and taxes in ancient Sumeria, Fibonacci bringing Indian numbers to Europe, and other fascinating subjects.

- We watched short biographies of Babbage and Lovelace, full-length ones of Turing and Von Neumann. The "code breakers" of WWII.

- Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII, another good one.

- There's more history in PBS' Crash Course Computer science, than you might expect. It is great although so peppy we had to watch at .9x with newpipe. Shows relays, vacuum tubes, to ICs, to the Raspberry Pi. As well as the logic gates they model.

- "The Professor" at Computerphile is a great story teller about the early days.

- There are great videos about CTSS being developed at MIT I think, where they are designing an operating system via paper terminal and trying to decide on how to partition the memory/storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q07PhW5sCEk

- The Introducing Unix videos by ATT are straight from the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

- The movie/book "Hidden Figures" touches on this time as well. Facing obsolescence by IBM, one of the characters teaches herself Fortran.

- The Pirates of Silicon Valley is a fun dramatization of the late 70s to 80s PC industry. It specifically calls out the meeting between MS and IBM as the deal of the century. We also watched a "Berkeley in '68" doc on Kanopy to set the stage before this one. Interesting, but a tangent.

- The "8-bit Guy" is also great, he dissects and rebuilds old home computer hardware from the same era, and teaches their history as he does it. Even his tangential videos on why there are no more electronics stores (besides Apple) in malls is great.

- There are good docs on the "dead ends" of the industry as well, such as "General Magic" and "Silicon Cowboys."

- "Revolution OS" a doc about the beginnings of FLOSS and Linux.

Rest in Peace!

Her demonstration of the capabilities of the (then novel) pipes and scripts of the Unix Operating System is one of the best parts of this documentary:

https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?t=935

⬐ Ambroos

I love what she does here: https://youtu.be/XvDZLjaCJuw?t=949, also demonstrating pipes and scripts. The input she chooses makes the whole segment pretty damn funny.

Great video of Brian Kernighan & friends at Bell Labs explaining the UNIX system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

Great video of Brian Kernighan & friends at Bell Labs explaining the UNIX system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

Hint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

⬐ throwaway81523

That's an old video promoting Unix, so I don't see what you're getting at. Unix is not a distributed OS. The web has to work over communications channels with fairly high latency, so you don't want a file-system-like interface either. If you have something specific in mind, maybe you could say what it is instead of being coy.

⬐ dang-guefever

Sorry, if you can't read between the lines at even this point, I doubt being explicit would help.

⬐ throwaway81523

Give it a try maybe.

⬐ dredmorbius

The context should hopefully be clear to most, but the "other operation systems" that are being referred to as complex, with fussy filesystems and poor inter-process control, would be IBM's mainframe operating system OS/360.

The direct call-out is the reference to The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks.

In Unix, file creation is as simple as '>'

In OS/360, there's a long set of JCL that is required.

(For some sense of what JCL is like, the much-derided 'dd' command is in fact a bit of OS/360 JCL that was migrated to Unix, largely in order to read and write from and to IBM-compatible tapes and punchcards.)

⬐ ketanmaheshwari

Apart from the technical goodies, I really like the calmness in their voices and overall demeanor. Hard to see it in recent videos.

⬐ neilpanchal

They spoke with great clarity and enunciation for sure. No filler words. I suspect, it also has to do with how audio was recorded, processed and mastered. It’s got that warm fidelity as if it went through a low pass filter.

⬐ mseepgood

Does anybody know what's the cause of today's lack of calmness in voice and demeanor?

⬐ rented_mule

From my point of view it's the proliferation of sources of (especially monetized) information competing for attention.

In the 1970s, major US cities would have ~10 radio stations, ~5 TV stations, 2 major newspapers, and no access to online content. It was not uncommon for people to spend an hour of more with their local newspaper each day, and significantly more than that on Sunday. From today's perspective, TV news felt somber. Even frightening cold war developments would be spoken about with the calmest of demeanors.

In the 1980s cable brought that to a few dozen channels and it was getting easier to get national newspapers (NYT, USA Today, etc.). The 1990s saw many cable systems with 100+ channels and people started going online in large numbers.

Now there are so many options in video (100s of TV channels, YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Disney+, ...), audio (countless podcasts), and written content (news sites, blogs, social media, ...) that trying to get noticed in order to make money often leads to more extreme content. If people are navigating through hundreds of options per hour, how else can you get a chance to be noticed? Think of things like angry shouting in cable news, click bait, and political "discourse" on Facebook and Twitter.

The most successful early examples of this (MTV and pro wrestling in the 80s/90s, shock jocks proliferating in the 80s/90s, Fox News in the late 90s, Twitter and Facebook before 2010, etc.) are old enough that people under 40 years old have always seen some form of it. People under 25 who are most grabbed by it have seen little else. When Twitch streamed Bob Ross for a week in 2015, many young people saw him as a rebel because his demeanor was so foreign to them. People tend to emulate the norms they see, so now you see various levels of it in content that isn't so desperate to get noticed.

Mike Judge (a significant part of MTV's success in the 90s) played out where this was heading in his 2006 film Idiocracy. I think it was intended as a cautionary comedy, but it increasingly feels like a prescient horror to me.

⬐ JKCalhoun

Yeah, I don't know. That struck me as well.

Because I am a closet luddite I'm going to suggest that they were unconcerned about a notification, text, call, or email interrupting them.

They knew the news was not going to arrive until the next morning (in rolled up paper form in their driveway), that if there were a bomb explosion or plane crash somewhere in the world they would hear about it in due time, they would go home soon and be disconnected from university/work and would crack open the book they had set down the evening before....

⬐ smoldesu

I've given it a bit of thought in the past, and my working conclusion is that people don't care about things unless they're sensationalized.

In a world where information is reaching maximum saturation, anyone with internet access has to learn how to separate themselves from the internet to some degree. This learned separation is the enemy of habit, and therefore the mutual enemy of people who make a living off of clicks/views/impressions. To get past that, you need to start using words that pry past our filter of mediocrity and go straight to the brain, or introducing topics that pique our curiosity. No longer is that tacit curiosity enough to make people sit through something, so in comes the buzzwords, exciting rhetoric and loud voices. Internet profiteering is about filing away everything superfluous, and focusing on being the loudest (or at the very least, most listened-to) one in the room.

⬐ booleandilemma

Because nowadays they'd be called out for "lacking energy".

⬐ TedDoesntTalk

More difficult to get funding if you’re not visibly exhibiting excitement about your creation.

⬐ mmcgaha

Because everyone would rather listen to an exciting and engaging speaker. Of course, a calm and reserved voice is interesting today because it is exceptional in the current environment. I think Lester Holt's delivery is a good compromise of calm yet engaging.

⬐ walkerbrown

Early TV had few channels. Cable introduced greater selection and competition for attention, “<clickbait> after the break, don’t touch that dial!”

Now, professional YouTube creators tend to adopt a hyperactive persona for presenting. I’m unsure if this is tuned to feedback on viewership statistics, or if it’s a cargo cult practice mimicking the most subscribed accounts.

⬐ dredmorbius

This is a scripted, edited, and produced video. It was probably created with a total production timeline of many months. It's both educational and promotional, and was probably used both internally and externally by AT&T.

As others have noted, quality video content was still comparatively scarce, there wasn't much competing content (and certainly little on-demand as today). Long slow introductions were an opportunity for either assembled or broadcast audiences to settle in for the programme, as opposed today where a single video creation is competing from the first second to establish its interest and credibility.

The people interviewed are also at the top of their professions and game. They're not fighting to establish credibility, or promoting themselves within a field (though they might well be engaged in politicking internally within AT&T for budget, status, and resources).

By contrast, much (though not all) of what's created today is:

- Unscripted

- Unedited, has very minimal editing, or is poorly edited.

- Competes against a tremendous set of alternative content.

- Has short production cycles.

- Is mostly produced by individuals trying desperately to prove their own relevance.

- Is often created by (or about) people who are far from proficient, knowledgable, or, in an increasing number of cases, even remotely sane.

There are exceptions on both sides, and we suffer from several biases: survival bias of old works (crap production tends not to be retained or surfaced), familiarity bias with new works (we don't appreciate what's current or easily available). There were certainly numerous charlatans and frauds on video and audio before 2010. And there are people today who put out high-quality content that's well-prepared, scripted, and produced (Tom Scott, Derek Muller, and Destin Sandlin of YouTube all come to mind). The sober stuff produced today competes poorly against all the hyperactive instant-gratification of today. Though on reflection, AT&T's production probably didn't rate highly at the time against game shows and soap operas either.

⬐ jstanley

On the differences between shipping software and hardware:

> You don't demand that a piece of hardware suddenly do a completely different function. But people do that of software all the time.

These days you're lucky if your hardware continues to do the function you bought it for, let alone gaining new capabilities!

⬐ gabrielsroka

I love Brian Kernighan's teaching style. He is the K in "K&R C" and AWK.

⬐ marcodiego

It would be great if the example in https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?t=521 still worked.

⬐ yjftsjthsd-h

I strongly suspect that a lot of the commands he's using there are either shell functions or small scripts (or just aliases, actually) to make the example simple to follow. For instance, unique=uniq, lowercase='tr [AZ] [az]' (I think?), etc. You could trivially rewrite it today with a little effort to remake those.

⬐ jraph

It almost works.

- unique is called uniq, but you can write an alias. I would not be surprised if it was called unique in this video for presentation purposes and uniq already worked at the time.

- sort will work as is

- lowercase is tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' (you can write an alias).

- you need write programs makewords and mismatch and put them in $PATH (the current folder was probably in $PATH at the time but it's not anymore for security reason)

sort | uniq can be written sort -u.

But the gist of it is still accurate and still applies to today's unix-like systems, which is quite a thing for something that has more than 50 years.

⬐ kps

`makewords` is `deroff -w`; `mismatch` is `comm -23`.

⬐ bkirkby

`makewords` is also `tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n"`

⬐ jraph

Thank you, I didn't know neither of them and they will probably save me some time in the future.

⬐ iansee

If you guys the aesthetic of AT&T and Bell Labs there's this bot that posts random frames from these archive videos. https://twitter.com/attarchives

⬐ thecybernerd

There are some real treasures in the AT&T Tech Archives. I love this.

⬐ wyclif

I instinctively went to add this to my tech fave videos on YouTube, and was proud to discover that I already added it so long ago I forgot I'd done it already.

⬐ ydnaclementine

Great video, can't wait to hear that ending song sampled into a future haircuts for men album

⬐ systemvoltage

Those offices were super chic!

⬐ eplanit

I so miss the straightforward, personality/attitude-free style of presentation and demonstration. Hopefully that style will have some kind of comeback. Simplicity and sincerity are best. A great piece of history.

⬐ None

None

⬐ None

None

⬐ fswwi

UNIX is a terrible and overrated OS.

ITS was better.

⬐ ChrisArchitect

didn't see this previously when it's been posted 3-4 times every year for a decade.

You know you can enjoy the video (as we all do) without upvoting it.

⬐ digisign

I've never seen it until a few days ago, then of course saw it here!

⬐ dang

Looks like these are the past threads:

The Unix Operating System (1982) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23343753 - May 2020 (29 comments)

AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625837 - Oct 2016 (1 comment)

AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830478 - June 2014 (21 comments)

Interestingly enough, this video from the 1980s shows Brian Kernighan writing a one line spellchecker program in UNIX shell. Obviously, the computer that it’s running on is more powerful than a 256K PC. The point stands: some people are simply living in the future.

https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0

(Shell coding starts at 8:40)

⬐ abetlen

They really were. Here's a version of that video that includes Lorinda Cherry writing a talking calculator by piping together 3 unix commands.

https://youtu.be/XvDZLjaCJuw?t=828

This is an old but informative video on UNIX system productivity by AT&T hosted by Brian Kernighan [1].

Fun fact, the original unused PDP-7 computer mentioned in the article that being utilized by Ken Thompson to first develop UNIX actually belongs to another well-funded sound processing research group in Bell Labs.

[1]https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0

⬐ m_sahaf

It's interesting how the home directories were under /usr during that era. If you notice at 13:35, when Brian runs `pwd`, he's at `/usr/bwk` and he says: "that's where I start when I login." Is there any history behind the shift? Or is it just a Linux idiosyncrasy?

⬐ nineteen999

It's long been variable between UNIX versions and variants, for example Solaris 5.x (which is a descendent of AT&T UNIX shown in this video), the common location was/is /export/home, since home directories were commonly exported via NFS to other machines. It might have been IRIX from memory that even used /usr/people.

VFS was introduced around SVR4 as part of the SVR3/SunOS merge IIRC so that made it easier to mount home at whatever location most suited, but the reality already was that home was wherever your /etc/passwd entry said it was. Most Linux distributors had de facto standardised on /home long before the Linux FHS.

Looking at more recent BSD's, FreeBSD 11 seems to be using /usr/home, with both OpenBSD 6.x and NetBSD 8.x using /home by default.

⬐ qntty

Here's a little bit of the history:

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...

When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp...) and wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!).

⬐ zozbot234

> so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!).

Clearly, Unix was developed on 1440KiB floppy disks.

⬐ lakkal

That crunchy sound of the VT1xx terminal and the other keyboards in this video are giving me an intense feeling of nostalgia.

⬐ modmans2nd

I love that video. I’ve seen it 5 times and every time I have to watch the whole thing.

⬐ smabie

What commands is Kernighan using in his spell checker example? makewords? lowercase? unique? mismatch? Were these really commands in AT&T unix? I kind of suspect that they created some "unique" shell scripts for this video to make it easier to understand..

His full command is:

$ makewords sentence | lowercase | sort | unique | mismatch

⬐ jedieaston

I just checked in an AT&T UNIX emulator, and it doesn't look like any of those commands exist. I think they made them for the video.

⬐ anthk

makewords -> tr ' ' '\n'

unique -> uniq

lowercase is easy, tr a-z A-Z

mismatch -> loop and grep over the wordlist and check if the output on non-zero (no match), print that word. A trivial script. (while read line ; do if (grep -q "$line" /usr/share/dict/words) ; then ... )

⬐ mork5zid

I don't think mismatch was grepping over the dictionary at all. That's too slow. The reason you sort the input text first is because it's reading the input text and the dictionary at the same time, making only a single pass through the dictionary...

⬐ smabie

Yeah, of course. But why is this video claiming they are Unix commands when they are not? Are these just little shell scripts designed for the camera?

⬐ sergeykish

> existing UNIX programs (on your machine).

They emphasize that users build their own vocabulary. And it is quite possible these command were shared inside AT&T.

⬐ LeoPanthera

Maybe the idea is that every shell script compromised of existing, simpler commands, is automatically itself a "command" in UNIX. Obvious and simple today, but not a common concept when this video was made.

⬐ TomMarius

Wasn't that the same in operating systems like MS-DOS and its predecessors, and on Apple computers as well?

⬐ nineteen999

Well yeah I guess if you are thinking in terms of batch scripts, but DOS didn't exist until 1980, and UNIX had already been doing this within a multiuser, multitasking environment since at least 1972.

⬐ TomMarius

Oh, my bad, I confused the decade.

⬐ anthk

They may be, or not. Long ago grep was composed of an ed script (g/re/p), and a spell checker was trivially done this way over grepping /usr/share/dict/words.

The point is to show pipes to the public so they understand command chaining.

⬐ deviantfero

Kernighan is good at explaining things, so I'm guessing he wanted to make it as simple as posible, some of those just don't roll of your tongue as well as the aliased versions

⬐ teddyh

He also uses “p” as an alias for “more” (or possibly “cat”).

⬐ pmarin

The program is still in Plan9.

http://9p.io/magic/man2html/1/p

https://github.com/0intro/plan9/blob/master/sys/src/cmd/p.c

⬐ Wald76

I bet he just aliased commands for expository reasons: “uniq” aliased to “unique”, and “tr A-Z a-z” to “lowercase”.

⬐ Lex-2008

I like how back than they called shell scripts "shell sequences"

⬐ zozbot234

That term was used on Amiga as well, though (AFAICT) it was not common elsewhere. The default boot mechanism runs the Shell script 'startup-sequence', found in the root-level directory 'S' of the boot drive.

⬐ ferzul

what were pre-unix file systems like? it sounds like storing bytes in a file in a directory which is a kind of file was innovative, but it's effectively all there is today!

i know old macs had various attributes - e.g. you could store the owner of an file so when you opened it, it would run in the program that generated it, not necessarily the default for files of this type. but is that the alternaitive he had in mind?

⬐ mork5zid

In other operating systems, files had fixed-length records or were key-value stores.

⬐ BracketMaster

Saw that a year back. Thanks ATT for preserving this.

⬐ otagekki

Talk on Unix philosophy, Shell, pipes

⬐ combatentropy

featuring Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson.

⬐ geoffbp

Somehow haven't seen this before. Thanks!

⬐ dang

Submitted like 30 times but mostly with no comments, except in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830478

I'm always amazed how well Brian Kernighan can explain things. I love the episodes on the Computerphile youtube channel with him.

Recently I discovered the AT&T history channel, with this gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

There is a massive difference in appearance and clarity between him and the other people appearing in that video, even the "presenter"...

⬐ gftsantana

> Recently I discovered the AT&T history channel, with this gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

I go back to this video every once in a while ever since I discovered it a few years ago. I just think it is super relaxing. When I first watched it, I was beginning to use Linux and, when I opened my terminal emulator, I was like: "It's a Unix system, I know this!" The pipelines explanation was incredibly clear.

I also love the Computerphile episodes with professor Kernighan.

For me it's the unix example in [1] "AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System".

    $ makewords sentences | lowercase | sort | unique | mismatch -

It reads a file called sentences then prints the words that are not spelled correctly.

To me it's; concise, expressive, flexible, modular... Which makes it beautiful...

[1] https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0

AT&T Bell Labs made videos like this: https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?list=FLHa3ljE2SLOERhULuoHNx-Q

⬐ Aloha

That intro is clearly the result of too slowly delivered cue cards - it was painful to watch.

⬐ jonsen

I easily got each and every word spoken. And had time to think. A lot of old videos have a pleasant pacing.

Rob Pike 2018 — on average i got two out of three words and had to spend mental effort on interpolating — that was painful.

⬐ ontouchstart

I totally agree with you. I watched the video so many times that I "bookmarked it" with a one-cell Jupyter Notebook:

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/ontouchstart/colab_noteb...

Nice guide.

cd ~ command goes to home directory though, not root.

I wish someone showed me the UNIX operating system introduction by Kernighan et al before anything else. It can be found in AT&T arhives: https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0

⬐ chmaynard

Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, Aho, Johnson, and other seminal figures at Bell Labs explain why they invented Unix. If I had watched this classic film in 1982, it might have altered the direction of my work in software development.

⬐ umeshunni

The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind when watching the video.

I wonder if Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie even imagined at the time that their creation will still be carried in the pockets of over a billion people 30 years later.

⬐ NAFV_P

> The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind when watching the video.

Isaac Newton used the same phrase, but it was suspected he was referring to the short stature of his contemporary Robert Hooke.

Ritchie seemed down to earth, unassuming and hard working. That is why I am fond of him.

⬐ ineedtosleep

I don't know why it just happened now, but it finally dawned on me after seeing the video's kernel/shell/utilities graphic: the shell is a wrapper around the kernel.

⬐ TazeTSchnitzel

Well... the shell is a layer above the syscall functions which are a layer above the kernel :)

⬐ NAFV_P

The other film:

"The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw

⬐ omnibrain

I found the old Episodes of Computer Chronicles on Unix interesting to watch: https://archive.org/details/UNIX1985 and https://archive.org/details/unix_2

Totally unrelated: Gary Kildall comes across as if he's been a really nice guy. Poor guy. :(

⬐ woah

Lots of female developers in this video. What happened?

⬐ noobermin

I was going to mention that. I could recognize Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and Ken Thompson, but I have never heard of Lorinda Cherry [1]. Apparently, I should have, because she essentially inspired gnu plot utils, which must have had some influence on future plot utilities(?)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorinda_Cherry

edit: made a correction, oops

⬐ LukeShu

I don't know that gnuplot wasn't inspired by her work (it might have been). The wiki article you linked mentions GNU plotutils, which is different than gnuplot (gnuplot is not affiliated with GNU).

⬐ noobermin

Right you are, made an edit.

⬐ tomphoolery

As that one dude said at the beginning (after the guy who looks like Carl Sagan a little bit), the women in this video are not necessarily developers, but can program. At the time, I believe programming was largely done by women...the women would program the computers, while the men would design and build them. But that programming wasn't really "development", per se, it was more like grunt work. At least, this is the impression I get from conversations with my grandfather, who worked with Dr. John Mauchley on the ENIAC computer and helped found the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, one of the (if not THE) first corporations dedicated to producing computers.

Although ENIAC and such were the official start of the computing industry, the way you interacted with early computers was much different from the way you interact with the UNIX system, and thus, practically everything that's come afterward. So in many ways, this is the real start of the computing industry, to me anyways.

⬐ NAFV_P

Looking at the wikipedia article on Ritchie, I found this photo of attendees of the 1984 Usenix Conference [0].

At the bottom of the page it points out some faces. There is a tall guy to Dennis' right, named as Erik Fair (not familiar with him, I'll admit) but he looks a lot like Larry Wall.

The only other face I recognised was Peter Langston, it demonstrates how little is known by the general public (including myself) about the contributions of all these people to CS.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usenix84_1.jpg

⬐ NAFV_P

At exactly 7 minutes into the video, you glimpse Brian Kernighan's pair of walking boots, sporting some fabulous purple bootstraps.

⬐ subdane

I find this far more compelling for anthropological reasons than technical ones.

⬐ noobermin

I think it was shared for its historical interest. While the gist of unix presented here is the same as the unix we know today, obviously many things have changed since the 1980s.

⬐ jimbokun

Most of the big concepts underlying Unix described in the video still apply very well to Unix today.

⬐ noobermin

Right. I don't think I've heard of makewords or 'p' to print out a file, although gnu obviously has its substitutes ;)

⬐ jimbokun

I couldn't possibly disagree more.

The composition of programs through pipes remains a brilliant idea, and an extremely effective way to get a job done. I've lost track of the number of times I've heard a new programming tool described as "It's like Unix pipes for..."

C is still a remarkably popular programming language, and it has proven surprisingly hard to invent a new language that's better than C in every respect.

Many people could benefit from the ability to connect multiple programs in the shell to get a job done, even if they're not programmers.

It's hard for me to think of any computer scientists whose work remains as relevant today as the people in this video.

⬐ pjmlp

> The composition of programs through pipes remains a brilliant idea, and an extremely effective way to get a job done

Except pipes were already present in another operating systems at the time, http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html

> C is still a remarkably popular programming language, and it has proven surprisingly hard to invent a new language that's better than C in every respect.

In 70's already had a few system programming languages better than C in every respect, safety, modularization, thread support, low level programming, you name it.

C's widespread into the industry is a consequence of UNIX adoption by the industry.

⬐ kasperset

Also nice to see Alfred Aho(One of the creators of Awk).

⬐ TazeTSchnitzel

RIP Dennis Ritchie. We all owe a great debt to you.

Heck, here I sit typing this in Firefox, written in C++, a derivative of C, on OS X, a derivative of the UNIX system. I have a Terminal open with which I am compiling PHP, written in C. His works are still relevant to today's world beyond the grave.

Well, in 1992 when I learned it, it seemed like a long established and widespread practice. And I could hardly be blamed for not having a personal data point of the pronunciation when I was one years old. :)

If you look up "etc unix pronounciation", while there is a lot of bickering, I still think "etsy" is the slight majority among old timers. I will admit that this usage seems to have faded.

I spent some time trying to find video of any of the original Bell Labs Unix team actually saying the directory out loud--I couldn't find any. I'm going to keep searching, but they honestly seem to go out of their way to avoid it. I did find some fascinating videos along the way [1].

To my chagrin, there are a few oblique text references on the web that say indicate that within Bell Labs, it was pronounced "etcetera". But I'd still like a canonical reference.

[1] Like this video from 1982, including Kernighan, Thompson, Ritchie, and Aho. http://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0