UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use -- AT&T Archives film from 1982, Bell Laboratories

That was a great watch...and if you keep on watching for a few more minutes, you can watch Lorinda L. Cherry rewrite his implementation using Unix pipes and then creating a talking calculator. The screencasting technology wasn't quite there yet ;), but both are really excellent demonstrations and eludications of the Unix philosophy and mindset that is pretty much unchanged and invaluable ~34 years later ▶ this video

I love what she does here: ▶ this video , also demonstrating pipes and scripts. The input she chooses makes the whole segment pretty damn funny.

Look what I've found! Lorinda Cherry herself explaining how to write a "talking calculator" (in 1982!) using dc and Unix pipelines: ▶ this video

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

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. link UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use (1982) ▶ this video 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.

Others might also find interesting this video from 1982 where Brian Kernighan demonstrates building a simple spell checker using UNIX command line utilities: ▶ this video

See also a much younger Brian from 40 years ago explaining pipeline link Similar but using redirects instead of pipes ▶ this video

URL with time: ▶ this video In the same video, there's a fun moment where they demonstrate constructing a simple spell checker out of unix primitives, and the demonstrator comments that "unix" is a word unlikely to ever appear in the dictionary: ▶ this video Of course, now it's in every dictionary!

Unfortunately I think plan9 only remains this way by keeping the people who use it small, being elitist and somewhat unwelcoming[0]. That's not to say I wouldn't also recommend spending a weekend messing around. I was recently having a conversation about the unix philosophy on reddit[1]. As nix and software built for nix became more and more mainstream it becomes harder and harder to keep with the unix philosophy and the philosophy of this post. [0]: link [1]: ▶ this video