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

[Rob Pike]

I liked working with Ken.

One fond memory was porting Plan 9 to the SPARC over Christmas break.
People went home, we hacked, Bonnie brought us food. A week later
people came back and we had a new architecture up and running, pretty
much in toto. (The way the system worked made this a joy to do - so
much just worked right away, including for example the ps command.)

One whole day of that was dealing with register windows, which brought
nothing to the table but trouble, and forced us to use R1 as the stack
pointer register. That was not the fondest day.

Architecture people: please just let me pretend your CPU is like a
PDP-11. No surprises, OK? I'll handle the complaints about irrelevance
in the modern age.

-rob


On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 12:59 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024 at 6:53 PM, John Levine <johnl at taugh.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> To add to the praise, Ken, yourself, and others weren't exactly working on modern 115200 baud terminal emulators and IDEs with all the fancy modern tab completion and automatic linting either.  History has given me an appreciation that these sorts of conveniences work at all.  If I'm ever having a really bad day with my tools, I just think about Ken, Dennis, et. al. hammering away at 33 ASRs making legends happen and suddenly I don't feel so bad.
>
> - Matt G.