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1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

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414 points henry_flower | 1 comments | 19 Feb 25 21:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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m4r1k ◴[20 Feb 25 07:27 UTC] No.43112034[source]▶
I once saw a talk from Brian Kernighan who made a joke about how in three weeks Ken Thompson wrote a text editor, the B compiler, and the skeleton for managing input/output files, which turned out to be UNIX. The joke was that nowadays we're a bit less efficient :-D
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xattt ◴[20 Feb 25 12:57 UTC] No.43114120[source]▶
I’m wondering what the process was for the early UNIX developers to attain this level of productivity.

Did they treat this as a 9-5 effort, or did they go into a “goblin mode” just to get it done while neglecting other aspects of their lives?

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1. Daishiman ◴[20 Feb 25 19:06 UTC] No.43118732[source]▶
A lot of the supposed "features" we have in Unix nowadays are the result of artifacts resulting from primitive limitations, like dotfiles.

If you're willing to let everything crash if you stray from the happy path you can be remarkably productive. Likewise if you make your code work on one machine, on a text interface, with no other requirements except to deliver the exact things you need.