Thanks for submitting this. I did the interview. I think you have to listen to it to get the full experience. But here are some things that were interesting and surprising from the interview:<p>The UNIX room - The unix room at bell labs was a shared room where they would hang out and have coffee. Some people worked exclusively in the UNIX room, like Ken Thompson, but most worked in their private offices and came to the UNIX room to share what they worked on and have a coffee and catch up. This room was the culture center of the computing group at Bell Labs.<p>Because they were all sharing a file system on a single machine, it was easy for various people to iterate on programs. They only had one rule which was if you changed the program last, you were the owner. In some ways, it mirrors how open source works today.<p>Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible. Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembler and B interpreter for a mini-computer that ran a printer they were struggling with, in a couple of days, so that they could get it printing again. This blew Brian's mind.<p>At the time, Brian didn't think that the work they were doing was 'important' in a big sense. The culture was more like working with computers is hard, let's try to make it better and lets try to solve practical problems.<p>The book "Unix: A History and a Memoir" has many other great details.
For the uninitiated, Brian Kernighan also wrote a book titled "Unix: A History and a Memoir" published in 2019. Would recommend.<p>Goodreads Link - <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53011383-unix" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53011383-unix</a>
I had the fortune of taking a class with Brian Kernighan at Princeton and later having him advise my senior independent project, and the one thing I'll never forget is just how incredibly down-to-earth and kind he is.<p>An example: In that first class (COS 333) with ~150 students, I was surprised when he knew my name — and then I found out that he didn't know just my name but the names of all of his students. It takes a special kind of professor who takes the time to do that every semester.
0:16:40 For those who haven't seen it before, there's a Computerphile video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w</a> (related video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvwNKpDUkiE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvwNKpDUkiE</a>) about the hacking of the typesetting machine, a Mergenthaler Linotron 202.<p>0:24:31 The photo must be the one at <a href="https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/picture.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/picture.html</a> (probably the webpage, on Dennis Ritchie's old website, that made it famous recently).
This is in my queue! This is a great podcast, Adam Gordon-Bell is such a thoughtful interviewer, probably my favourite episode was "Don and Adam discuss Folds", it blew my mind and made me smile. Very highly recommended.
"I found it easier to program when I was trying to figure out the logic for myself rather than trying to figure out where in the infinite stack of documentation was the function I needed. So for me, programming is more like creating something rather than looking it up, and too much of today’s programming is more like looking it up." - K
One of my favorite moments from the birth of UNIX is Ken Thompson's telling (in this interview with Brian Kernighan) of how he got hired to work at Bell Labs:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o</a> (starting at about 11 minutes in to the video)
Pro :<p>1. It is great to hear Brian Kernighan's account of the early history of Unix.<p>2. It was wonderful to hear about his interactions with one of my personal heroes, Richard Hamming.
Hamming's book on error correction (Coding and information theory) is amazing.<p>3. It is very kind of Adam Gordon Bell to make these wonderful interviews available. These interviews are oral history that will never again be available once the interviewees are gone.<p>Con:<p>1. The interviewer talks far too much about irrelevant trivia and often talks at greater length about than the people being interviewed.<p>2. It has the feel of Adam Gordon Bell interviews Adam Gordon Bell.
A little less Bell and more of the interviewee would have been less irritating and easier to listen to.<p>Despite my caveats, I intend to download and listen to many more of these interviews on my commute to work.<p>Keep up this historically important work, but please let the interviewees talk without continually interrupting.
I read the K&R's C Programming book when I was in undergrad.<p>It's different from other programming books I read from APress, O'Reilly publications.<p>Hard to digest but never before read a book so short and crisp that fully explains the programming language.<p>To any noob programmer out there, I'd say pick K&R's book, spend a semester on it, do the exercises. You will become better engineer. You'll not regret.
> I think the closest you get to important is thinking, “It’s hard to write programs, what can we do to make it easier to write programs? ... can I do something better on that? And if what I find challenging or hard or whatever is also something that other people find hard or challenging or whatever, then if I do something that will improve my lot, I’m perhaps improving their lot at the same time.<p>> Bonnie went off to California bearing their son who at the time, I think was a year old or something like that. And was there for three weeks. And so Ken figured that he was close and so he built himself basically a working operating system in three weeks. And I think you could argue that’s serious soccer productivity in some sense.<p>> ... And then what I showed Colby was actually something that basically said sleep for two seconds, and then print the result I had done the day before.<p>& I really wish the chocolate bar thing is done in my office one day!
Adam, you said at the end of the interview that you are looking for ways to grow your listener base. Well... I guess you got exactly what you were looking for, between interviewing Brian Kernighan and being featured on Hacker News...<p>That's probably a good formula to go by: get interviews with "big names" who have done incredible things in the field, make the content as good as you can, and submit to HN.<p>Personally I would <i>love</i> to hear an interview with Fabrice Bellard, if you can get him. That man is a true "superstar" of programming. Interview Fabrice and you have my subscribe, 100%.
Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is another interesting read (book-length) along the same lines. It is not only about the tech (which it covers over a wider period than the OP, from before Unix to after it), but talks about the personal habits and idiosyncrasies of the people involved too, e.g. the penchant of some of the earlier ones for Chinese food, and the unit milliblatts :). Check it out.
This is a great interview, but the most interesting thing I learned is that I've been mispronouncing Brian's name for years. Apparently the 'g' is silent.
> Multics was not a success. Bell Labs pulled out of the project, no more operating system work at Bell Labs. It was a waste of time, that became the sentiment of management. Ken in particular thought the system was too complex, but it was interactive and it was far ahead of this batch processing punch card world.<p>Nope, in fact it even had a better security model that UNIX clones are yet to achieve.<p><a href="https://multicians.org/myths.html#fail69" rel="nofollow">https://multicians.org/myths.html#fail69</a>
K&R is the best known, but his other books are terrific. Software Tools showed how programs can simultaneously be powerful and simple, and decades later I still use things from Kernighan and Pike. Just today I wrote an AWK one-liner to process a log file.
The time window is slipping by now, but we are living in a world where computing titans stride the earth. It's the computing equivalent of the time of Newton and his influence on Physics.
I was looking for interviews/videos with Dennis Ritchie but I couldn't find any one that's over a few minutes.<p>I also wondered if there are sources from any of their (Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and the group) work hopefully in C or something that I can actually understand.
This is an old but informative video on UNIX system productivity by AT&T hosted by Brian Kernighan [1].<p>Fun fact, the original unused PDP-7 computer mentioned in the article that being utilized by Ken Thompson to first develop UNIX actually belongs to another well-funded sound processing research group in Bell Labs.<p>[1]<a href="https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0</a>
Url changed from <a href="https://corecursive.com/brian-kernighan-unix-bell-labs1/" rel="nofollow">https://corecursive.com/brian-kernighan-unix-bell-labs1/</a>, which points to this.