The early users being patent secretaries, then "administrative kind of stuff, typing in trouble tickets," and adoption spreading because people liked it, is kind of cool. That creates different kinds of pressures than a big top-down-dictated project does, maybe healthy pressures: if you're going to play with a new idea about how things should work you can't break things; you need the thing running reliably for the people using it day-to-day. One way you can have huge projects fail is by fiddling around too long without contact with reality.
Given Linux's origins--"(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"--it's interesting that early UNIX, in this telling, was also not the big professional push to build the OS of the future so much as just some folks trying to cobble something useful together (though of course, that they were playing around in Bell Labs gave their experiment some great advantages!).
There's this hardcore punk album from 1981 called "This is Boston not LA." On it, there's a track called "Radio UNIX USA" by the FUs.
I can't find ANY origin stories about the title. The lyrics have nothing to do with UNIX either, weirdly enough. However, this band is from Boston, and MIT was doing UNIXy stuff at around this time.
Anyone have any clue as to the origin for this track?
The lyrics include the lines "But you got / No balls no balls no balls no balls no balls / No balls no balls no balls no balls no balls", so "Unix" is very likely a pun on "eunuchs". I'm not very familiar with US radio station naming conventions, but it seems like 4-letter call signs are common? So the origin could be as simple as converting "eunuchs" to a radio station call sign.
All US FM radio station call signs start with either W or K (depending on location, mostly); an acronym starting with U wouldn't look like a call sign at all to me
One of my favorite Ken Thompson hacks is one where he demonstrated how a backdoor could be introduced into a compiler in such a way that it would be difficult to notice https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack
I hadn't heard about the stolen security boots. It's interesting that it was resolved by a peer-to-peer negotiated settlement for the security guards to violate official corporate policy, rather than through management.
The early users being patent secretaries, then "administrative kind of stuff, typing in trouble tickets," and adoption spreading because people liked it, is kind of cool. That creates different kinds of pressures than a big top-down-dictated project does, maybe healthy pressures: if you're going to play with a new idea about how things should work you can't break things; you need the thing running reliably for the people using it day-to-day. One way you can have huge projects fail is by fiddling around too long without contact with reality.
Given Linux's origins--"(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"--it's interesting that early UNIX, in this telling, was also not the big professional push to build the OS of the future so much as just some folks trying to cobble something useful together (though of course, that they were playing around in Bell Labs gave their experiment some great advantages!).
Okay, so weird and maybe unrelated question.
There's this hardcore punk album from 1981 called "This is Boston not LA." On it, there's a track called "Radio UNIX USA" by the FUs.
I can't find ANY origin stories about the title. The lyrics have nothing to do with UNIX either, weirdly enough. However, this band is from Boston, and MIT was doing UNIXy stuff at around this time.
Anyone have any clue as to the origin for this track?
The lyrics include the lines "But you got / No balls no balls no balls no balls no balls / No balls no balls no balls no balls no balls", so "Unix" is very likely a pun on "eunuchs". I'm not very familiar with US radio station naming conventions, but it seems like 4-letter call signs are common? So the origin could be as simple as converting "eunuchs" to a radio station call sign.
All US FM radio station call signs start with either W or K (depending on location, mostly); an acronym starting with U wouldn't look like a call sign at all to me
One of my favorite Ken Thompson hacks is one where he demonstrated how a backdoor could be introduced into a compiler in such a way that it would be difficult to notice https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack
I hadn't heard about the stolen security boots. It's interesting that it was resolved by a peer-to-peer negotiated settlement for the security guards to violate official corporate policy, rather than through management.
Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East in 2019 > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o
Birth of a serious change (and leadership) always requires questioning of status quo and probably a bit of rowdy, jungle instincts.
back in the days when beards were serious beards
We still have serious beards kicking around.
The Linux folks, Andrew Kelley etc all qualify as True Beards.
That’s…sarcasm?
You don't think Ken's beard was serious?
Nope - simple observation!