VCF East: Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan

Two of the most interesting ones I've seen this year: Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame, and much more) interviewing Ken Thompson (initial author of UNIX, though you probably already knew both of these): lots of interesting anecdotes, like getting a chess machine seized by the US government: ▶ this video Drew DeVault, (sway/sr.ht/much more author) hacking on his Wayland VR desktop inside of his Wayland VR desktop (don't believe the people who say you can't do programming inside of VR yet!): link NB. the second video is on a PeerTube instance. PeerTube is a federated and decentralized YouTube alternative.

Also I found these fascinating: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) has a lot of history and takes you back in time.. link Brian Kernighan 'interviews' Ken Thompson (2019) - Ken telling stories. They're both very funny, a very entertaining video, some stories I (and even Brian) hadn't heard. ▶ this video UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use (1982) link Also the other day I read in the AWK book that it was mainly inspired by SNOBOL4, so looked at some SNOBOL4 books from archive.org, from 1970-2 and just before, slightly earlier than Unix history takes you back. One tells you how to organize your punch cards to feed in the program.. Another had a bibliography with many dozens of SNOBOL books. It was widely used by people in the humanities apparently; like AWK it was at home dealing with words and text.

Looking forward to reading this! Had the pleasure of seeing Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson speak at VCF East earlier this year, totally worth a watch: ▶ this video I highly recommend hitting up a Vintage Computer Festival if you've got the opportunity ( link ). Not only did Kernighan and Thompson speak, but also Joe Decuir of Atari & Amiga fame.

The article provides ancillary hyperlinks to nearly every topic mentioned, but fails to link the actual video of Kernighan speaking. Here it is: link In reality the subject of the talk is Kernighan’s perspective of the history of Unix at Bell Labs. The questions covered in the article are the least interesting part, and make up about six minutes at the very end—a small fraction not just of the 70-minute video, but even of the 30-minute Q&A session. In short, the headline and article are disappointing clickbait, but the video itself is worth watching for Kernighan’s relating of history and his theories about what confluence of factors made Unix successful (collegial environment, good management, overall mission…). Another worthwhile video from the same conference (in a different year) is Kernighan’s interview of Ken Thompson: ▶ this video

The interview is here: ▶ this video One hour long, and Thompson tells a lot of entertaining stories. Kernighan does a good job of just letting Thompson speak.

This isn't specifically PDP-8-related, but the story of Bell Labs going to extraordinary lengths to hire Ken Thompson is a hoot: ▶ this video ...not to mention Ken's story of Doug McIlroy writing a compiler for TCG on a sheet of paper, then using it to compile itself - by hand - thus "feeding his sheet of paper his sheet of paper."

See Ken Thompson's monologue about creating Unix in 3 weeks: ▶ this video Programmers used to be pretty damn productive.

I found Kernighan's book quite riveting. If you want the short version (this might spoil some of the book) this talk is quite something: ▶ this video

One of my favorite moments from the birth of UNIX is Ken Thompson's telling (in this interview with Brian Kernighan) of how he got hired to work at Bell Labs: ▶ this video (starting at about 11 minutes in to the video)

> Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible. Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembler and B interpreter for a mini-computer that ran a printer they were struggling with, in a couple of days, so that they could get it printing again. This blew Brian's mind. For the next level up here's Ken (in a very interesting conversation with Brian Kernighan about the history of Unix) describing McIlroy: > McIlroy keeps coming up. He's the smartest of all of us and the least remembered (or written down)... McIlroy sat there and wrote ---on a piece of paper, now, not on a computer--- TMG [a proprietary yacc-like program] written in TMG... And then! He now has TMG written in TMG, he decided to give his piece of paper to his piece of paper and write down what came out (the code). Which he did. And then he came over to my editor and he typed in his code, assembled it, and (I won't say without error, but with so few errors you'd be astonished) he came up with a TMG compiler, on the PDP-7, written in TMG. And it's the most basic, bare, impressive self-compilation I've ever seen in my life. This story, by the way, leads into how Ken created B (and how that was eventually improved by Dennis Ritchie into C). [0] ▶ this video

The interview starts at ▶ this video Brian Kernighan coined the word “Unix” and is the “K” in K&R (co-author of the The C Programming Language book). Ken Thompson co-invented Unix. Full of funny anecdotes like needing 3 weeks to write the kernel and serendipitously his wife was going on vacation for 3 weeks.

The question that I'm curious about is "why does POSIX require unary negation to have a higher precedence?" Was it a "this is the way that bc worked in the 70s because it was easier to write a parser for it?" or was there some more underlying reason for the "this problem gets really icky if unary negation has lower precedence than the binary operators and makes for other expressions that become less reasonable?" It's like the Logical XOR issue ( link ) ... and I'm of the opinion that there's a real reason why this design choice was made. (Aside: Some other historical "why things work that way" touching on dc's place in history: Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East 2019 ▶ this video - it goes on to pipes and dc makes an appearance there again)