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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: 0s | 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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ironmanszombie ◴[20 Feb 25 15:38 UTC] No.43115981[source]▶
Back in my early career, the company I worked for needed an inventory system tailored to their unique process flow. Such system was already in development and was scheduled to launch "soon". A few months went by and I got fed up with the toil. Sat down one weekend and implemented the whole thing in Django. I'm no genius and I managed to have a solution that my team used for a few years until the company had theirs launched. In a weekend. Amazing what you can do when you want to Get Shit Done!
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1. smm11 ◴[20 Feb 25 21:35 UTC] No.43120528[source]▶
I worked at a place in love with their ERP system. Some there had been using it 30+ years, since it ran in DOS.

My Excel skills completely blow, and I hate Microsoft with a passion, but I created a shared spreadsheet one long Saturday afternoon that had more functionality than our $80K annual ERP system. Showed it to a few more open-minded employees, then moved it to my server, never to be shown again. Just wanted to prove when I said the ERP system was pointless, that I was right.