Stephen Bourne: Early days of Unix and design of sh [video] (opens in new tab)

Off-topic, but I'm always looking for hour long talks/videos to put on while I'm cooking and I can't sit at a computer, or my hands are too dirt to finger a book. Thanks HN for giving me good content! I maintain a list of these and they come up sufficiently often enough that I always have something to watch when I have to cook.

btw, pdf slides here (first 'slide' link, not the last one): http://www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/events/612.en.html (https://archive.is/gforA)

ps: Going back even further (multics), Louis Pouzin part in the idea of a shell http://www.multicians.org/shell.html (https://archive.is/zVtQ8)

I very recently found about his love for C macros

http://research.swtch.com/shmacro

I find it pretty amazing what a tight time some of these influential and lasting designs were implemented in. Bourne joins in 1975 and by the time he gets to 1977 in the talk there is already so much industry practice solidified.

How many years have some of us written shell scripts and make files, and here he is talking about sh and make popping up within 2 years in the 1970s...

I was eager to watch this video but I found it disappointing. The presentation was disorganized and unfocused, although Bourne did have some interesting war stories about Bell Labs. A specialist in writing shells might enjoy this talk, but there wasn't much value for a generalist like me.

Cambridge: computer algebra and John Conway's Game of Life on a PDP7. Pretty good preparation...

...thanks for posting

Thanks for this.

He sounds like Arthur C Clarke!