Re:Restoration of First Edition Unix Kernel Sources
by cpr on Sunday September 13, 2015 @07:26PM
(#10213114)
Boy, that brings back real memories!
Harvard got the first Unix v7 outside of Bell Labs in, I think, '75, and my office mate in the old Harvard graduate computing center (a medieval beast compared to the new Gates/Ballmer cheese wedge building), Geoff Steckel, had some kernel listings on his desk which I of course devoured without really understanding their provenance.
Being teethed on (post-IBM mainframes systems hacking) PDP-10 assembler, TOPS-10, TENEX and Lisp (Harvard's ECL was a Dylan-like algebraic syntax on top of a Lisp internally), reading the C kernel listings was like a revelation: here was an operating system written in a high-level language!
The line printer listings were printed on an upper-case-only printer (not many lower-case-capable printers existed in the DEC world at the time) with strike-throughs (overprinted) used for upper-case letters.
In any case, it was immediately clear that this was something special. I didn't actually get involved with Unix until a few years later in grad school at Columbia, and then ending up as a Unix (BSD) kernel hacker at Multiflow, a Yale spin-off, some years later.
Harvard got the first Unix v7 outside of Bell Labs in, I think, '75, and my office mate in the old Harvard graduate computing center (a medieval beast compared to the new Gates/Ballmer cheese wedge building), Geoff Steckel, had some kernel listings on his desk which I of course devoured without really understanding their provenance.
Being teethed on (post-IBM mainframes systems hacking) PDP-10 assembler, TOPS-10, TENEX and Lisp (Harvard's ECL was a Dylan-like algebraic syntax on top of a Lisp internally), reading the C kernel listings was like a revelation: here was an operating system written in a high-level language!
The line printer listings were printed on an upper-case-only printer (not many lower-case-capable printers existed in the DEC world at the time) with strike-throughs (overprinted) used for upper-case letters.
In any case, it was immediately clear that this was something special. I didn't actually get involved with Unix until a few years later in grad school at Columbia, and then ending up as a Unix (BSD) kernel hacker at Multiflow, a Yale spin-off, some years later.
(Sorry for waxing "old duffer...")