[TUHS] Step Into the Real-Life Lumon Industries, the Breakout Star of ‘Severance’

[Rob Pike]

>
> As for the Unix Way (tm) I think the folks at PARC were honestly puzzled,
> if they thought about it at all.  Most were Tenex sorts of folks, or
> interested in languages, GUIs, and distributed computing.  Unix was time
> sharing, and something you did if you didn't have your own computer.


I was at PARC in 1984, working with Dan Ingalls. I mentioned I was
surprised that Smalltalk had no concurrency†, that the UI (let alone the
system) was completely single-threaded. Only the window with focus could
execute any code. Dan being Dan, he immediately got to work making a form
of concurrency happen, followed by a delightful orgy of researches playing
with the new toy. I loved it.

Because: sometimes in isolation you miss important things going on in the
outside world.

-rob

† The starting idea for the Blit né Jerq‡ was bringing a UI to Unix that
supported parallel execution, after a demo of the Three Rivers Perqs at
Lucasfilm, an emulation of the Alto, and seeing only missed opportunities.


‡ The name "Jerq" was Lucasfilm's own moniker for the Perq, and we asked
them for permission to use it, which they happily provided.
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