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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: 0.221s | 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. kragen ◴[21 Feb 25 10:40 UTC] No.43126073[source]▶
We aren't talking about a very large amount of code here. Mainly the process was implementing several similar systems over the previous 10 years. You'd be surprised how much faster it is to write a program the fifth time, now that you know all the stuff you can leave out.