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UNIX - A History and a Memoir - Brian Kernighan's latest

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PDP-8:
Brian Kernighan - one of the ATT researchers - basically the "voice" of Unix since it began has released yet another great book.  Maybe you've read some of his others over the decades.

UNIX
A History and a Memoir
Brian Kernighan

Even though the history of Unix is well documented on the net, this is not just a simple rehash of all that, nor just pining for the good old days.  Professor Kernighan describes and provides some great detail whether you are just a history fan, or reading between the lines - still see the spark of it all.

Wonder what is was like working at ATT research back then?  He's got some great detail that go beyond recent videos and the like.

So it's not just a dry technical history, but it's like being invited to have a down to earth talk with someone who was there practically from day one.  And how it makes your cellphone, nay even *CORE still relevant.  Good ideas live beyond changes in hardware.

A *book* ? What is that?  It's how we used to do it.  Get in the comfy chair, get some good backlighting on, and spend an enjoyable afternoon reading.  A lost art. :)

Might be of interest especially to those of us in the *core crowd, which expouses many of the same values.

hiro:
not a lost art. tinycorelinux is so tiny that now i have more time to read than ever!

PDP-8:
Me too but I won't be able to fully grok Tinycore until I retire. :)

There's an opportunity for a good tech writer with say Amazon publishing - although pics usually are just black and white.

Without getting too cornball about it, I find that underneath the hood of ALL the 'Core projects, a simple "elegance" about the underlying infrastructure so fascinating worthy of study.   It isn't just a "me too" application launcher.

I always wonder - what would some of the early luminaries like Brian Kernighan, Doug McIlroy, Rob Pike, Steve Johnson, John Mashey, Steven Bourne and the rest of the crew (most are still around) would think of Tinycore as it relates to today?

I'd think they'd find it fascinating.

hiro:
they probably don't like that it's linux, but they should certainly be able to appreciate the simplicity compared with other distros.
from what i heard of pike and kernighan they are rather involved in google web services these days, probably trying as hard as possible to use their language golang to make this less painful ;)

hiro:
also they will probably appreciate our usage of ln -s to bind the libs and binaries of packages into the right places in the root filesystem. they invented this idea (albeit more elegantly) and i'm using tinycorelinux partly bec. this reminded me of how it's done in plan 9.
i.e. there is no PATH in plan9, everything is union bound into /bin.
it's a little bit like ln -s /amd64/bin /bin, just that with ln we need a hack and ln every individual file, to get around that we cannot "union-link" directories.
oh, and yeah, they hated ln. bec. it's not so flexible, for example in this regard ;) (and it's a completely different layer, in the on-disk filesystem!)

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