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Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

123 points| fjarlq | 6 years ago |amazon.com

22 comments

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flowerlad|6 years ago

Zero mentions of Solaris. Surprising. BSD, Minix and Linux are mentioned. Even Santa Cruz Operation is mentioned. Bill Joy and Sun Microsystems are mentioned. Solaris was the most influential Unix of the 90’s so its omission is curious.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu|6 years ago

>Solaris was the most influential Unix of the 90’s so its omission is curious.

I think you meant 2000s because in the 90s Solaris was nothing special. All the interesting stuff (zones, SMF, dtrace, ZFS) was introduced in Solaris 10, which was released in 2005.

pjmorris|6 years ago

Rummaging around the local mall bookstore in ~1982, I came upon 'Software Tools in Pascal', by Kernighan and Plaugher. I fell in love with the ideas, and the prose. It became the first of what is now a nearly complete collection of everything Kernighan has published (I don't have the AMPL book, or 'D for Digital'.) I can't calculate how much I know because of Dr. Kernighan, or how much my career's course has been altered by the levers he's given me, but it's a large number.

This is now on my Amazon wish list (How many of you have private lists for 'things to remember and check out later?' Mine's called 'Random Followup Stuff')

AnimalMuppet|6 years ago

You might find this interesting, then: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pasc...

It's Kernighan's view of Pascal after writing "Software Tools in Pascal". It's not (as widely perceived) a hit piece on Pascal. It's Kernighan saying "I wrote the original 'Software Tools' in Ratfor. Rewriting it in Pascal should have been much easier than it was. Why?"

naikrovek|6 years ago

Amazon is returning a 404 on this item for me, when this post is 6 hours old. Googling for the book and following amazon.com links gives similar 404 errors.

taborj|6 years ago

Interesting, it opened the Amazon page for me without issue...

jasoneckert|6 years ago

I ordered a copy just now, but was somewhat disappointed that it didn't ship in tape format.

dredmorbius|6 years ago

It's a long-proved bound paper-tape format.

chrstphrknwtn|6 years ago

Copyright 2020. Spooky.

maxlybbert|6 years ago

When I was a teenager, I bought a book from a bookstore that had a copyright date or printing date a month in the future. I was surprised that the date included the month, and realized the page has been laid out weeks in advance. But even so, it felt weird to own that book for that first month.

a3n|6 years ago

$su date 010112012020