Ken Thompson Recalls Unix's Rowdy, Lock-Picking Origins

You don't think Ken's beard was serious?

Nope - simple observation!

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.

Yes. Locks convert knowledge directly into strength.

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

If it isn't on the Internet, it didn't happen right? Maybe we can change that...

Unix _is_ a play on "eunuchs" but that fact wouldn't have sold well during the mini computer [ https://www.britannica.com/technology/minicomputer ] wars, especially in the later 1980s [ https://youtu.be/IRpKHFfsH3A ] when Unix was exiting the exclusive world of academia and Bell Labs. This was an era when everyone for the prior thirty years had come up with mainframes and data centers were stocked full of "heavy iron" (IBM and IBM-clones like Amdahl) or at least very large "mini" computers from companies like DEC, which was so well run from the late 1950s on that its leader has been declared to be one of the greatest in the history of Corporate America and was studied at Harvard and Wharton for decades. The Unix technology "specialists" on the other hand were super-nerds: ghastly, feral, mostly pear-shaped, plain clothed technicians only BARELY tolerated in their own settings. [Ok, maybe all of them except Eric Schmidt heh.] Realize that the vast majority of American engineers in the 1980s still wore suits and ties --but not if they had anything to do with Unix. (Ken Olsen fer sure wore suits, but also drove a Ford Pinto, BTW.) When the demo dollies tasked with pushing any number of alternate hardware platforms up against IBM and DEC in the constant battle for those massive "heavy iron" budgets were asked to pitch UNIX (System 3, System V, System 7, BSD) up against bedrock OS/MVS and VMS, at first they would answer the obvious question (of what UNIX stood for) with "UNIX is not UNIX". That pretty much stuck in the period literature (COMPUTER MAGAZINE RAGS) too --no way they were going to answer "eunuchs"!

Also worth noting in this context: This was the era of "Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM" and the amount of money your company spent on "iron" was seen as a marker of its success AND YOUR PERSONAL CAREER STATUS in the tech universe, so you can imagine the type of customers and professionals that actually did buy into obscure UNIX-based hardware. This also created a lot of "friction" in the Industry that you can't easily learn about in this Future. It wasn't like today where people have "home labs" and can train themselves to go for whatever job they want using free software (even while sitting in a hellish ghetto of the poorest country on Earth). Back in the day, one was trained on what their school or employer had available (or they learned from carrying around books and imagination, or using X.25-based timeshare if they were lucky). Period. So maybe you landed a great job, but you had to use a shitty Unix computer with broken down terminals or maybe you had a shitty job but they gave you a coveted VAXstation. All your experience with Unix wouldn't buy you much in a DEC or IBM shop and vice versa. The implications this had on the layered applications of the day were profound, but mostly this created a lot of animosity between tech professionals of different backgrounds. There were constant attempts to address this, but the computer hardware manufacturers were complicit in it because it made it easier to lock their customers into one architecture or another.

<cue https://youtu.be/ciUfdVs-p84 >

Is it safe to now say that all general purpose operating systems except LINUX are nothing but husks to run LINUX (and whatever legacy ecosystem)? The most successful of all the 1980s demo dollies, The Scott McNealy, took a page out of DEC's playbook and instead of trying to go in with a massive super powerful Unix mini computer, he would pitch a few workstations running something called "SunOS" (BSD eunuchs) that "networked" over TCP/IP to effect "the system is the network" (a totally new concept then) before his company bet everything on a new chip (SPARC) that used RISC architecture to outperform the established industry players and make the guys in charge of those "heavy iron" budgets feel a bit inferior if they didn't buy-in a little. SunOS, SPARC and Solaris definitely caused a lot of disruption, but it really never had much of a chance to unseat IBM or DEC and was also slowly sinking into La Brea tar pit along with everything else (though it had a bit more life due to all the capX as the dot-com bubble was inflating around TCP/IP). IBM had already totally lost control of its maverick PC initiative (by under-estimating Billy The Kid who had also hired away DEC's top VMS engineer) and the ENTIRE market for mini computers (whether they ran OS/MVS, VMS or eunuchs like SunOS or NextStep) totally collapsed. Just the promise that a PC might be as powerful at VMS and could network as well as SunOS was sufficient to change perception and bet corporate budgets on a "computer, not a terminal, for every desk." More importantly, the resulting PC industry economies of scale meant that all of the tech workers could own a "home lab" and, in particular, allowed at least one kid growing up just outside the Soviet Union to go through the pages of Andy Tanenbaum's famous book on operating systems (that demonstrated key concepts for the reader through the creation of a eunuchs operating system Andy called MINIX). Combined with the political antics of a creepy academic communist at MIT and an irresponsible Defense backbone ISP in San Diego, the slow death of all operating systems has manifested (because LINUX ELF binaries and runtime support are now available on IBM mainframes, Windows and as of last June, macOS). Of course, there are still legacy shops, embedded systems and most of the new ELF-running operating systems still run LINUX in nested virtualization, but LINUX has pretty much taken over the game and eunuchs is el muerto.

Meanwhile, even the AIs incorrectly think that UNIX is "a playful reference on UNICS, the larger, more complex Multics 'project'" Sounds totally plausible like everything else coming out of an LLM, but we meat bags know better.

--- 'Now there were these places called cities and they had the knowin' of a lot of things, they did. They had skyscrapers, videos and sonic.. Then this thing called the Pockey Clips happened and you have to understand, this is Home and there's no Tomorrow Land.' https://youtu.be/rn4aIinTJBQ

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.

Well yes of course, I just meant that them having voice transcription AI even in the 60s is not that unlikely, since they did a lot specifically in speech synthesis and audio analysis, besides everything else. I don't think they had it, but they had some of the important prerequisites figured out.

I guess it makes sense, voice-related AI is highly relevant for a phone company.

EDIT: Not full voice transcription, but it turns out that they did have systems to recognise digits and small (~a dozen) vocabularies of command words.

The prototype called Audrey could recognise 0-9 spoken digits with 97% accuracy in 1952! Although it did have to be calibrated for each individual speaker.

Then they introduced passwords. However, Stallman insisted that everyone use the same one, you can still boot it:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its

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.

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.

I just remembered this video https://youtu.be/7vWSi44ZTSw and it seemed like a chill place with nerds having fun making something. (Actually they were still DMA at this time, not Rockstar).

And as for the achievement, the product turned into a franchise with the biggest entertainment products ever made (GTA 5/6).

Yes, but that requires admitting that the employees are flesh and bones humans with human social relationships between them and this stuff can't be tabulated and accounted and bean-counted. And it's rather outright seen as a risk factor, makes people less fungible, there's a risk that they gang up against the management, or there could be legal risk if they build too much of an insider culture etc.

Highly aligned motivated and talented people with shared core values (like the pioneer ethos of hackers, tech optimism etc, and cultural references etc) can achieve so much. And they tend to work odd hours and overtime because they want to make the thing, and not because of hoping to get rich.

Now I have two things to say about this.

First, this type of passion is special and a manager can't hope to simply force it, and if it's demanded then all you get will be talkers who know the lingo of being so super passionate. The thing must be worth being passionate about and the team has to be aligned with the goal and have latitude to shape the project. This kind of work bes happens when the higher up kinda forget the team and they just intrinsically do it. It can't be planned.

Second, some people are very opposed to these hight effort, almost obsessed teams because they see it as unfair ideals or unfair competition, because obviously someone with a family who has to pick up the kids at 4 pm can't do this cracked push overnight and sleeping at the office etc. But greatness simy cannot be made from steady, fixed-pace 9-5 jobs with work life balance and atomized employees. And that's okay, for most things we don't need greatness just okayness. But often people still can't stand that there are such great teams and want to drag them down in one way or another.

The article even makes reference to the use-or-lose approach to managing a departmental budget: And history shows that it happened partly because the department paying for it “had extra money, and if they didn’t spend it, they’d lose it the next year…”

There's a danger of romanticizing the past, but I think there was just less metric based pressure on these people than today. In the 70s, the whole consultant-led transformation of all corporations wasn't fully complete yet.

It’s worth remembering this was Bell Labs. It was a research and development organization. These weren’t line maintenance people and telephone operators free to create things during their work. They did a lot of applied research and a lot of pure research at Bell Labs back in the day.

Lasers, fiber optics, underseas cables, communication satellites, transistors, discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and more came out of that organization. It was largely supported by the consent deal between the US government and AT&T that allowed them a telephone monopoly so long as their non-telephone research and inventions didn’t get marketed separately. So they’d create things that helped the company and the rest of the world, and then just release those things to the rest of the world.