The History of Unix, Rob Pike

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 something that was on the front-page recently: the displays they were using (JERQ/Blit bitmap displays) depended on a routine that Larry Tesler co-invented (the bit blit, hence the name "Blit"). link link If you want to give it a try, I think 9front ships with a Blit emulator these days; load up v8 and you should have a nice few hours poking around. link

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

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

▶ 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.

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