[PLUG-TALK] Brian Kernighan's _UNIX: A History and a Memoir_

[Russell Senior]

A few months ago, I heard about Brian Kernighan's new book. Being an
owner of the original K&R book, as well as the 2nd edition, and also
being a fanboy and frequent user to this day of awk, this seemed more
than worth reading. I heard about it from my favorite model 33 teletype
person, Hugh Pyle, on his excellent-if-now-sparsely-produced twitch.tv
shows.

Being the spouse of a librarian, I couldn't bring myself to buy a
copy. Instead I checked with Multnomah County Library. They didn't have
it, but they did have a button to click on to request they purchase
it. I pushed that button. They thought it was a good enough idea that
they did purchase it. A nice perk of suggesting titles is that you can
ask to auto-hold it, to be first in line when it comes in. That happened
sometime last week, so over the weekend while I was recovering from a
mild cold I got to start reading it, currently about 75% through.

One of the first things I noticed was a name, Fernando Corbató, an MIT
professor, who was the leader of the Multics project. Anyone with any
knowledge about Unix history at all knows that Multics was the slightly
drunk stepfather of Unix. Of course, the perspective from Multics is a
little different, and a little hurt about all the trash talk it gets
from its step kid and his friends.

That said, I don't know if I'd known of Fernando before, but the last
name is very familiar. I met a man named Steve Corbató a little over a
year ago at a telecommunications conference focused on Oregon, called
Oregon Connections. He is currently the Executive Director of a thing
called Link Oregon, a consortium of universities that bought a couple
strands of fiber crossing the state, super sharp guy.  Corbató isn't a
name you come across every day, so I naturally wondered if they were
related. Turns out, bingo, Steve is Fernando's nephew. Fernando passed
away just last summer at the age of 93.

It got me a little curious about Multics. Apparently, it was moderately
successful on big iron, and pioneered many of the ideas that made their
way into Unix and other modern operating systems. The last known Multics
implementation was unplugged in 2000.  There is an emulator, based on
SIMH. Maybe you can even run it on a raspberry pi!  Steve pointed me at
this:

  https://multicians.org/

Maybe someday we can have some curious person do a Multics talk at PLUG.


-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net