[HN Gopher] AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System [video] (1982)
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AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System [video] (1982)
Author : neilpanchal
Score : 126 points
Date : 2021-08-28 07:06 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| didn't see this previously when it's been posted 3-4 times every
| year for a decade.
|
| You know you can enjoy the video (as we all do) without upvoting
| it.
| ydnaclementine wrote:
| Great video, can't wait to hear that ending song sampled into a
| future haircuts for men album
| eplanit wrote:
| I so miss the straightforward, personality/attitude-free style of
| presentation and demonstration. Hopefully that style will have
| some kind of comeback. Simplicity and sincerity are best. A great
| piece of history.
| fswwi wrote:
| UNIX is a terrible and overrated OS.
|
| ITS was better.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jstanley wrote:
| On the differences between shipping software and hardware:
|
| > You don't demand that a piece of hardware suddenly do a
| completely different function. But people do that of software all
| the time.
|
| These days you're lucky if your hardware continues to do the
| function you bought it for, let alone gaining new capabilities!
| dang wrote:
| Looks like these are the past threads:
|
| _The Unix Operating System (1982) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23343753 - May 2020 (29
| comments)
|
| _AT &T Archives: The Unix Operating System_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625837 - Oct 2016 (1
| comment)
|
| _AT &T Archives: The Unix Operating System_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830478 - June 2014 (21
| comments)
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| I love Brian Kernighan's teaching style. He is the K in "K&R C"
| and AWK.
| thecybernerd wrote:
| There are some real treasures in the AT&T Tech Archives. I love
| this.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Those offices were super chic!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The context should hopefully be clear to most, but the "other
| operation systems" that are being referred to as complex, with
| fussy filesystems and poor inter-process control, would be IBM's
| mainframe operating system OS/360.
|
| The direct call-out is the reference to _The Mythical Man Month_
| by Fred Brooks.
|
| In Unix, file creation is as simple as '>'
|
| In OS/360, there's a long set of JCL that is required.
|
| (For some sense of what JCL is like, the much-derided 'dd'
| command is in fact a bit of OS/360 JCL that was migrated to Unix,
| largely in order to read and write from and to IBM-compatible
| tapes and punchcards.)
| marcodiego wrote:
| It would be great if the example in
| https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?t=521 still worked.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I strongly suspect that a lot of the commands he's using there
| are either shell functions or small scripts (or just aliases,
| actually) to make the example simple to follow. For instance,
| unique=uniq, lowercase='tr [AZ] [az]' (I think?), etc. You
| could trivially rewrite it today with a little effort to remake
| those.
| jraph wrote:
| It almost works.
|
| - unique is called uniq, but you can write an alias. I would
| not be surprised if it was called unique in this video for
| presentation purposes and uniq already worked at the time.
|
| - sort will work as is
|
| - lowercase is tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' (you can write an
| alias).
|
| - you need write programs makewords and mismatch and put them
| in $PATH (the current folder was probably in $PATH at the time
| but it's not anymore for security reason)
|
| sort | uniq can be written sort -u.
|
| But the gist of it is still accurate and still applies to
| today's unix-like systems, which is quite a thing for something
| that has more than 50 years.
| kps wrote:
| `makewords` is `deroff -w`; `mismatch` is `comm -23`.
| jraph wrote:
| Thank you, I didn't know neither of them and they will
| probably save me some time in the future.
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| Apart from the technical goodies, I really like the calmness in
| their voices and overall demeanor. Hard to see it in recent
| videos.
| mseepgood wrote:
| Does anybody know what's the cause of today's lack of calmness
| in voice and demeanor?
| rented_mule wrote:
| From my point of view it's the proliferation of sources of
| (especially monetized) information competing for attention.
|
| In the 1970s, major US cities would have ~10 radio stations,
| ~5 TV stations, 2 major newspapers, and no access to online
| content. It was not uncommon for people to spend an hour of
| more with their local newspaper each day, and significantly
| more than that on Sunday. From today's perspective, TV news
| felt somber. Even frightening cold war developments would be
| spoken about with the calmest of demeanors.
|
| In the 1980s cable brought that to a few dozen channels and
| it was getting easier to get national newspapers (NYT, USA
| Today, etc.). The 1990s saw many cable systems with 100+
| channels and people started going online in large numbers.
|
| Now there are so many options in video (100s of TV channels,
| YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Disney+, ...), audio (countless
| podcasts), and written content (news sites, blogs, social
| media, ...) that trying to get noticed in order to make money
| often leads to more extreme content. If people are navigating
| through hundreds of options per hour, how else can you get a
| chance to be noticed? Think of things like angry shouting in
| cable news, click bait, and political "discourse" on Facebook
| and Twitter.
|
| The most successful early examples of this (MTV and pro
| wrestling in the 80s/90s, shock jocks proliferating in the
| 80s/90s, Fox News in the late 90s, Twitter and Facebook
| before 2010, etc.) are old enough that people under 40 years
| old have always seen some form of it. People under 25 who are
| most grabbed by it have seen little else. When Twitch
| streamed Bob Ross for a week in 2015, many young people saw
| him as a rebel because his demeanor was so foreign to them.
| People tend to emulate the norms they see, so now you see
| various levels of it in content that isn't so desperate to
| get noticed.
|
| Mike Judge (a significant part of MTV's success in the 90s)
| played out where this was heading in his 2006 film Idiocracy.
| I think it was intended as a cautionary comedy, but it
| increasingly feels like a prescient horror to me.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know. That struck me as well.
|
| Because I am a closet luddite I'm going to suggest that they
| were unconcerned about a notification, text, call, or email
| interrupting them.
|
| They knew the news was not going to arrive until the next
| morning (in rolled up paper form in their driveway), that if
| there were a bomb explosion or plane crash somewhere in the
| world they would hear about it in due time, they would go
| home soon and be disconnected from university/work and would
| crack open the book they had set down the evening before....
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This is a scripted, edited, and produced video. It was
| probably created with a total production timeline of many
| months. It's both educational _and_ promotional, and was
| probably used both internally and externally by AT &T.
|
| As others have noted, quality video content was still
| comparatively scarce, there wasn't much competing content
| (and certainly little on-demand as today). Long slow
| introductions were an opportunity for either assembled or
| broadcast audiences to settle in for the programme, as
| opposed today where a single video creation is competing from
| the first second to establish its interest and credibility.
|
| The people interviewed are also at the top of their
| professions and game. They're not fighting to establish
| credibility, or promoting themselves within a field (though
| they might well be engaged in politicking internally within
| AT&T for budget, status, and resources).
|
| By contrast, much (though not all) of what's created today
| is:
|
| - Unscripted
|
| - Unedited, has very minimal editing, or is poorly edited.
|
| - Competes against a tremendous set of alternative content.
|
| - Has short production cycles.
|
| - Is mostly produced by individuals trying desperately to
| prove their own relevance.
|
| - Is often created by (or about) people who are far from
| proficient, knowledgable, or, in an increasing number of
| cases, even remotely sane.
|
| There are exceptions on both sides, and we suffer from
| several biases: survival bias of old works (crap production
| tends not to be retained or surfaced), familiarity bias with
| new works (we don't appreciate what's current or easily
| available). There were certainly numerous charlatans and
| frauds on video and audio before 2010. And there are people
| today who put out high-quality content that's well-prepared,
| scripted, and produced (Tom Scott, Derek Muller, and Destin
| Sandlin of YouTube all come to mind). The sober stuff
| produced today competes poorly against all the hyperactive
| instant-gratification of today. Though on reflection, AT&T's
| production probably didn't rate highly at the time against
| game shows and soap operas either.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Because nowadays they'd be called out for "lacking energy".
| smoldesu wrote:
| I've given it a bit of thought in the past, and my working
| conclusion is that people don't care about things unless
| they're sensationalized.
|
| In a world where information is reaching maximum saturation,
| anyone with internet access has to learn how to separate
| themselves from the internet to some degree. This learned
| separation is the enemy of habit, and therefore the mutual
| enemy of people who make a living off of
| clicks/views/impressions. To get past that, you need to start
| using words that pry past our filter of mediocrity and go
| straight to the brain, or introducing topics that pique our
| curiosity. No longer is that tacit curiosity enough to make
| people sit through something, so in comes the buzzwords,
| exciting rhetoric and loud voices. Internet profiteering is
| about filing away everything superfluous, and focusing on
| being the loudest (or at the very least, most listened-to)
| one in the room.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Because everyone would rather listen to an exciting and
| engaging speaker. Of course, a calm and reserved voice is
| interesting today because it is exceptional in the current
| environment. I think Lester Holt's delivery is a good
| compromise of calm yet engaging.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| More difficult to get funding if you're not visibly
| exhibiting excitement about your creation.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| They spoke with great clarity and enunciation for sure. No
| filler words. I suspect, it also has to do with how audio was
| recorded, processed and mastered. It's got that warm fidelity
| as if it went through a low pass filter.
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(page generated 2021-08-28 23:01 UTC)