[TUHS] Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

John Levine johnl at taugh.com
Thu Jul 4 11:53:23 AEST 2024


According to  <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au>:
>Developers of Initial Unix arguably were 10x-100x more productive than IBM OS/360, a ‘best practice’ development at the time,
>so what CSRC did differently is worth close examination.

Ken Thompson was an astonishingly productive programmer. I don't think
you can build a business plan that starts with "hire someone like
Ken."

One weekend just for fun he pounded out most of an APL interpreter,
which I then took and spent a month part time adding a few features
like saving and loading workspaces, and adjusting it to use the APL
character set on our funky bitmap terminals at Yale. He did more in
the weekend than I did in the month, and I am not a terrible
programmer.



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