The History of Unix, Rob Pike

Stephanie Borgman · 119K views · 2018 · 1:00:38

Open on YouTube

History of computingOperating systems & kernelsTech pioneers & interviewstalk

Why Hacker News recommends it

Mostly cited as a source of Unix history stories and asides such as the Crabs prank program and the BLIT terminal.

What it is

Rob Pike gives an insider's account of the history of Unix and the development of key pieces of modern computing, including Bell Labs anecdotes.

Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2018 to 2021.

What Hacker News said

Recommends kick · 2020-02 · on “Crabs: The bitmap terror (1985) [pdf]”

Crabs was probably the first graphical prank program—most assuredly the first well-documented one: there are a lot of scattered anecdotes about it around. Here's an amazing talk by Rob Pike where it's casually mentioned, for example: [this video] It's not something you see very often anymore, partially because modern windowing systems (and systems in general, really) were built with different security models in mind (you can probably remember a few similar programs released into the wild for real mode operating systems, they were especially common then), but also because windowing systems have moved away from how simple UNIX's windowing system was at the time. It's actually kind of relevant to so

Cites wging · 2018-11 · on “The History of Unix, by Rob Pike [video]”

I opened this earlier, and it linked to [this video] -- I think a moderator may have 'fixed' it in a really silly way.

Cites throwaway487550 · 2018-12 · on “An Introduction to the EMACS Editor (1978)”

[this video] among other things. These were places where old-school (with classical understanding, if we follow Robert M. Pirsig) people tried to reduce grounded in reality concepts to optimal (as humanly possible) implementations, as opposed to the modern tendency to pile up more and more crap.

Cites fjarlq · 2019-10 · on “Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan”

Videos of Ken Thompson and Rob Pike telling Unix history stories: Ken Thompson (interviewed by Brian Kernighan, 2019, starts after 7m38s): [LINK] Rob Pike (Unix History presentation, 2018, starts after 3m40s): [this video]

Cites rasz · 2021-08 · on “Xerox Alto Emulator”

another one was BLIT [LINK] [LINK] also mentioned in The History of Unix, by Rob Pike [this video] then there was Star