Unix: A History and a Memoir

A fascinating view into the creation of the most important Operating System in history. Kernighan’s prose reads a bit like Feynman’s: terse, accurate, slightly puckish. Amazing how much the researching team at Bell Telephone Labs, the research arm of AT&T, contributed to the history of computing. 9 Nobel Prizes, 5 Turing Awards. Also amazing to think a conglomerate as dispassionately and militantly monopolistic as AT&T did not try and profiteer off the creation of Unix, at least not until too late. Bell Labs was one of those perfect petri dishes a la Bletchley Park or Menlo Park or Los Alamos Laboratories where, as Kernighan puts it, “a handful of talented people with good ideas and a supportive environment do change the world with their inventions” (179). It actually makes me melancholic that I haven’t had a chance to work in an environment like that.

Kernighan populates the pages here with the intimidating genius that went into the creation of Unix and so many of the underlying tools (awk, make, C, sed, vi, TCP/IP, etc.) and philosophies (the Unix philosophy, modularization, componentization) that we still use today. Ken Thompson (inventor of Unix), Dennis Ritchie (inventor of C), Doug McIlroy, Brian Kernighan himself, Eric Schmidt (author of Lex and eventual CEO of Google) all loom larger than life. It would have been an amazing experience to have been a part of.

One thing that is striking (and there are so many throughout the book) is the emphasis on documentation and writing – so many Bell Labs researchers were also excellent documenters, and the documentation that came out of Bell Labs is as foundational as the tech. Kernighan mentions that everyone working in unit 1127, where Unix was invented and innovated, took documentation seriously, and there are so many important books to have emanated from that research institution. If nothing else, I need to take my documentation and technical writing seriously, eschewing literary stunt pilotry and adornments. Stick to the facts and minimize interpretations.

Also interesting questions:

• How did so much innovation happen in one place? Was it just smart people, a long leash, and oodles of money? Or is there something else?
• This type of research mill doesn’t exist anymore, does it? And certainly not in a way that is intertwined with capitalistic gain. Most of the inventors here didn’t have the radical economic success of newer “visionaries” who were also product gurus.

More to read:

• Gertner’s Idea Factory about Bell Labs more generally, which was doing a ton of additional innovation.
• Steven Levy’s Hackers about the history of the “computer revolution”