It's interesting and heartwarming to see how similar the spirit of many successful software projects was. Creative collaboration, open play, extremely high trust, by people who really intrinsically love what they do.
It goes against so much of the MBA-worldview and bigcorp offices.
Unix, GNU, Linux, early Python, early Rockstar Games etc.
As for Rockstar North/DMA specifically: It was a bunch of nerds making games in Scotland. From having reverse engineered gta3 and vice city and therefore knowing the code of these games quite intimately, i can tell that even at that time (i don't know what exactly was meant by "early") they were still a fairly small bunch of very talented people building the best game together that they could. No huge engines or design patterns, just very straightforward, well or reasonably well written code that does just what's it supposed to. All from scratch, the tooling as well. Of course that's just my interpretation (and maybe i'm projecting a bit) but i imagine it must have been a very fun project for the people involved. Doesn't reek much of management, bureaucracy and questionable practices getting in the way.
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
It's interesting how so many of the early tools were designed to create "communities" (mesg, talk etc.). The semi open nature of the platform really encouraged it too. It's nice to be able to cd into someone else's home directory and look at their files.
The passwords were only if you were connecting over the network. If you were using a directly attached terminal, you didn't need one.
RMS insisted that everyone use their UNAME as their password, but he wasn't widely listened to because the whole reason PWORD came into effect was because turists were getting increasingly destructive. People weren't happy when their mail got marked read (or worse, deleted) because some random from the network had logged in as them simply because they could and did not understand what their automatic login script was doing.
ITS had no file permissions, but even before PWORD was installed to keep randoms from the network away there were means of keeping the turists out when the system was to be reserved for Real Work. Other parts of the system that were considered sensitive were hidden behind undocumented commands or program-level passwords - For example, the innards of INQUIR, since the INQUIR database determined who was to be excluded and who was not.
There may have been no file permissions, but there was a definite hierarchy of users that was enforced by other (generally more subtle) means.
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.
> Thompson remembers designing the Unix filesystem on a blackboard in an office with Rudd Canaday — using a special Bell Labs phone number that took dictation and delivered a typed-up transcript the next day.
Fancy :), this just became normal for the general public in the last couple of years. I assume of course that there was a secretary at the end of the line, not AI. But it's not completely unthinkable, Bell Labs did do very impressive things in text-to-speech at least.
Yeah, something about the ephemeral nature of spoken words that makes it easier to ramble and therefore go into unexpected and more "natural" directions, compared to text which I also have the need to strictly control as I'm typing it.
Using dictation for when you really need to not go back and edit is really helpful.
The serious beards were a century earlier, when the terms "sideburns" and "mutton chops" were coined, when Dickens had a doorknocker beard, when Thomas Nast drew Uncle Sam with a goatee, and very few men were clean-shaven.
One of the early pictures on that page shows Ken Thompson didn't have a beard in the early 1970s.
It is most likely, related to how growing one nowadays is a kind of hipster thing with the trendy barber shops decorated as if they were western barber shops scattered a bit all over the globe.
It's interesting and heartwarming to see how similar the spirit of many successful software projects was. Creative collaboration, open play, extremely high trust, by people who really intrinsically love what they do.
It goes against so much of the MBA-worldview and bigcorp offices.
Unix, GNU, Linux, early Python, early Rockstar Games etc.
> extremely high trust
A lot of problems disappear when you have a high-trust societies, projects, companies, etc.
I would add "Ken Olsen"-DEC and Sun Microsystems.
> early Rockstar Games
I did not expect to see them in this list, can you elaborate?
As for Rockstar North/DMA specifically: It was a bunch of nerds making games in Scotland. From having reverse engineered gta3 and vice city and therefore knowing the code of these games quite intimately, i can tell that even at that time (i don't know what exactly was meant by "early") they were still a fairly small bunch of very talented people building the best game together that they could. No huge engines or design patterns, just very straightforward, well or reasonably well written code that does just what's it supposed to. All from scratch, the tooling as well. Of course that's just my interpretation (and maybe i'm projecting a bit) but i imagine it must have been a very fun project for the people involved. Doesn't reek much of management, bureaucracy and questionable practices getting in the way.
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
It's interesting how so many of the early tools were designed to create "communities" (mesg, talk etc.). The semi open nature of the platform really encouraged it too. It's nice to be able to cd into someone else's home directory and look at their files.
That's ITS' philosophy and design, not Unix. Every serious Unix server would have every HOME dir with 0700 perms.
ITS had no permissions and encouraged collaboration since the beginning.
Then they introduced passwords. However, Stallman insisted that everyone use the same one, you can still boot it:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its
The passwords were only if you were connecting over the network. If you were using a directly attached terminal, you didn't need one.
RMS insisted that everyone use their UNAME as their password, but he wasn't widely listened to because the whole reason PWORD came into effect was because turists were getting increasingly destructive. People weren't happy when their mail got marked read (or worse, deleted) because some random from the network had logged in as them simply because they could and did not understand what their automatic login script was doing.
Login in was just a 'gentleman' policy. Everyone would just have root permissions and help/get helped from anywhere to anywhere in the system.
ITS had no file permissions, but even before PWORD was installed to keep randoms from the network away there were means of keeping the turists out when the system was to be reserved for Real Work. Other parts of the system that were considered sensitive were hidden behind undocumented commands or program-level passwords - For example, the innards of INQUIR, since the INQUIR database determined who was to be excluded and who was not.
There may have been no file permissions, but there was a definite hierarchy of users that was enforced by other (generally more subtle) means.
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.
> Thompson remembers designing the Unix filesystem on a blackboard in an office with Rudd Canaday — using a special Bell Labs phone number that took dictation and delivered a typed-up transcript the next day.
Fancy :), this just became normal for the general public in the last couple of years. I assume of course that there was a secretary at the end of the line, not AI. But it's not completely unthinkable, Bell Labs did do very impressive things in text-to-speech at least.
My thoughts come more fluently as speech than in writing. With writing I'm always wanting to go back and edit, which is distracting.
Yeah, something about the ephemeral nature of spoken words that makes it easier to ramble and therefore go into unexpected and more "natural" directions, compared to text which I also have the need to strictly control as I'm typing it.
Using dictation for when you really need to not go back and edit is really helpful.
"Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernihgan" is also an excellent read.
Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East in 2019 > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o
Love this one, well worth the watch
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
The serious beards were a century earlier, when the terms "sideburns" and "mutton chops" were coined, when Dickens had a doorknocker beard, when Thomas Nast drew Uncle Sam with a goatee, and very few men were clean-shaven.
One of the early pictures on that page shows Ken Thompson didn't have a beard in the early 1970s.
That’s…sarcasm?
It is most likely, related to how growing one nowadays is a kind of hipster thing with the trendy barber shops decorated as if they were western barber shops scattered a bit all over the globe.
You don't think Ken's beard was serious?
Nope - simple observation!
We still have serious beards kicking around.
The Linux folks, Andrew Kelley etc all qualify as True Beards.
If you want to see Ken's contributions to Go, they are all there in Git. There's some fun stuff there (no spoilers). :)