[HN Gopher] Annotated Unix Magic Poster
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Annotated Unix Magic Poster
Author : kaycebasques
Score : 182 points
Date : 2025-04-05 00:04 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unixmagic.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (unixmagic.net)
| grandiego wrote:
| The #38 is controversial as noted. To me it represents the
| branching of Unix flavors, mostly derived from the AT&T and BSD
| versions (represented by the glasses.)
| nine_k wrote:
| To me, the stuff that grows from a shell invocation must be a
| process tree.
| tempodox wrote:
| Quite. I felt reminded of Git but it did not exist yet in the
| 1980s.
| k3vinw wrote:
| Interesting. When I look at this I see printed circuitry like
| you would find on a PCB. In which case it could represent the
| electrons flowing downwards into the processor which powers the
| shell. And the power source might be the wizard himself or his
| beard.
| righthand wrote:
| The power source is the fire underneath the shell.
| k3vinw wrote:
| Ahh. Good point! Perhaps a better analogy would be that the
| brain processing power is represented by the circuitry. I'd
| be curious to other interpretations for why it appears
| where it does.
| psychoslave wrote:
| #28, pwd, looks like a play on words with "powder" that you would
| put in a box.
| schoen wrote:
| I think the spool with usr written on it most likely refers to
| the /usr/spool directory, where user mailboxes (and I think print
| jobs) were traditionally kept.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Somehow I had never heard of/seen this before. It looks like a
| prog rock album cover or something.
|
| Some old commands in there I haven't used in a long time (poke,
| uucp), or never used - I think the troff I know is actually the
| one in GWBASIC (tracing off).
| jibal wrote:
| Much of the acceptance of UNIX at Bell Labs was due to its role
| as a typesetting system, with troff, eqn, and tbl commands. I
| worked for a UNIX support company (Interactive Systems
| Corporation) and our first customer was the U.S. Supreme Court
| because they deal with so many documents.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| When I first started using Unix in school in the early 1980s,
| at least a third of the time was using nroff/troff, tbl and
| eqn. Maybe another 20% playing rogue. The rest was used to
| become a vi/ex advanced user, writing csh and awk scripts,
| and learning C.
|
| The article mentions the "t" in troff, but doesn't mention
| that "roff" was short for "run off". I forget what the "n"
| was for.
| abetusk wrote:
| "New" roff [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nroff
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The TRS-80 has TROFF and TRON!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQoL_qpYbW0
|
| More useful but not quite as magical as DECSYSTEM 10 and
| DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC's "LISTREVERSE" command!
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210713130832/https://imgur.com...
|
| Chalk one up for DEC and BASIC. What other programming
| languages support that feature, huh?
|
| Now all you need is a COMEFROM and COMESUB and RUNREVERSE (or
| NUR) statements, and you can write reversible BASIC programs!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Clock_World
| DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC User's Guide: LISTREVERSE command
| LISTREVERSE LISTNHREVERSE LISTREVERSE and
| LISTNHREVERSE print the contents of the user's memory
| area in order of descending line numbers. LISTREVERSE
| precedes the output with a heading, LISTNHREVERSE
| eliminates the heading. LISTREVERSE
| EQUIV 10:53 13-NOV-75
| 40 END 35 PRINT "THE EQUIVALENT CURRENT IS",I, "
| AMPERES" 25 I=E1/R 10 INPUT R 5
| INPUT E1 READY
|
| http://bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-1...
|
| http://bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-2...
|
| Emacs should have an edit-reverse-mode!
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I liked Rocky Mountain BASIC with it's nice string operations
| and first class matrix operations.
|
| I think it had a sort function too. But can't remember.
| dmazin wrote:
| This is amazing. Does anyone know how to get a physical copy?
| darnir wrote:
| One of the previous times this was posted, someone offered to
| print and ship them. I got a A2 sized canvas print. It hangs in
| my home office now.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| The Internet Archive offers a 32Mb PNG file. Download that one
| and take it to your local print shop.
|
| https://archive.org/details/unix-magic-poster-gary-overcare-...
| dmazin wrote:
| Good idea, thanks!
| jiveturkey wrote:
| https://jpmens.net/2021/04/09/the-unix-magic-poster/
| liendolucas wrote:
| I would happily pay for a high quality print, but no idea where
| to get one from.
| aktuel wrote:
| If you open the image in a new tab you see that the resolution
| is good enough to order a print online from one of the
| countless print services.
| righthand wrote:
| Or ask your local print shop to make a print.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| https://jpmens.net/2021/04/09/the-unix-magic-poster/
| liendolucas wrote:
| Awesome, that looks like what I want. Thanks for sharing!
| ape4 wrote:
| How about annotating the word "magic"? Of course there's
| /etc/magic that's used by the `file` command. By the way it
| identifies itself, doing `file /etc/magic` works.
| ozbonus wrote:
| There are two more paintings in this series: Unix Views and Unix
| Feuds. High quality scans of all three are available on the
| internet archive.
| dfc wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/unix-magic
| thinkingemote wrote:
| #39 skull (dev/null) or daemon
|
| To me it looks like monkey face or like a cats face, a lynx?
| There is a tap / spigot above but I don't think tap wasn't much
| of a unix thing back then?
|
| edits:
|
| https://github.com/drio/unixmagic/issues/13
|
| > the top of head has an old time faucet handle and this might be
| referencing IO redirection (streams) as well as the stream of
| molten lava/magic brew.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| When i see the brick wall i think of the -Wall option in gcc.
| schoen wrote:
| Hmmm, it could also be the wall(1) program, which was already a
| part of AT&T Unix!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_(Unix)
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