Noah Sussman
Most diff implementations remain outwardly unchanged since 1975.
-- Wikipedia
It's been over a year since david23 lent me his copy of A Quarter Century Of Unix by Peter Salus (part of the Unix and Open Systems series from Addison-Wesley) and it has sat on my shelf throughout a good 18 months of learning to hack Perl, Ruby and the GNU toolset. I should mention that, 19 months ago, I thought I knew how to manage an HTML source tree with the GNU tools and Perl; but now I know differently (and I know slightly more than I did then as well).
One thing I've learned is that, although yes some of the "old" Unix tools were (apparently) perfected back when I was coding my first lines of BASIC, there's still a lot going on in the world of command-line tools. In fact, one of the big revelations for me in the last year and a half, is that despite the growing ubiquity of multitouch displays (a friend just built one in his garage) and iPhones; a lot of people still work in the shell.
So there's really just a great, healthy, growing community of open-source command-line hackers out there, and as I've joined their ranks, I've grown more and more interested in their (our) history. After all, I wrote my first lines of code on an Osborne computer running CP/M, an OS descended directly from the DEC operating systems that ran on some of the mainframes where Unix was spawned.
So it was great fun to finally get around to reading A Quarter Century Of Unix. For one thing, the book contains lots of relevant technical information (now I finally understand that the parenthetical numbers in the names of manpages, refer to volumes of the Unix manual). And, as with any history of the open-source movement, there are plenty of anecdotes about pranks and late nights and spur-of-the-moment experiments that turned into tools that are still powering the Internet today.
This book also helped me to appreciate that the "viral" spreading of Unix systems didn't start with Linux. Salus takes a couple of chapters to fully describe the dissemination of unlicensed or quasi-licensed Unixes, on great reels of magnetic tape, from MIT and Stanford to Wollongong university in Australia.
The thing that really got me about this book though, is all the details about the tools. It's good to reflect occasionally that "basic" tools like the text editor were invented, and not that long ago. And I didn't know that one of the first industrial uses of Unix, was in preparing documents for print. It's always good to be reminded that the shell predates the GUI. As my dad told me when, at the age of 10 I asked how a computer works: pictures may show up on the screen, but underneath, its all text (OK, he really said "underneath, it's all ones and zeroes," but close enough.)
Anyway, this book is a fun, fast read, and while it contains a lot of information found online, the writing is enjoyable, and, being written by Salus, who was present at many of the events he describes, there's a lot of interesting details.
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