:: Re: [DNG] Genuine, legitimate Early…
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Author: Tim Wallace
Date:  
To: dng@lists.dyne.org
Subject: Re: [DNG] Genuine, legitimate Early Days at Bell Labs - Youtube, the systemd of video: Was: Early Days at Bell Labs - Youtube, the systemd of video
Pretty good talk.  Reminds me of the other time I heard Brian (in person) at Purdue in 1977-78 or so.  He opened with two quotes, "The operating system comes between the user and the hardware" which got a laugh because although it was from a standard operating system textbook, he didn't mean it that way.  The second was "TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach" (TSO was an early IBM operating system).
I was using Unix since January 1976 for my research programming.  Brian looks older now, somehow ;)
--Tim

    On Tuesday, January 18, 2022, 04:31:49 PM EST, Gabe Stanton via Dng <dng@???> wrote:  


On Sun, 2022-01-16 at 15:58 -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> Now, does anybody have anything to say about the CONTENT of the video
> at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E ?


I enjoyed the video. To be more specific, I liked his assessment of
what 'ingredients' led to unix development and his assessment of
whether a 'unix' could be built again. As I think about it, that
question leads right to the quote from Dennis Ritchie that Brian put up
at the end of his speech or presentation. That is:

"What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to
do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form.
We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing [...] is
not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch but to
encourage close communication."


Pretty neat stuff. It occurs to me that what Dennis says was their
goal, was to preserve the human aspects of those criteria that produced
unix.

Thanks for sharing.


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