Looks like these are the past threads:<p><i>The Unix Operating System (1982) [video]</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23343753" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23343753</a> - May 2020 (29 comments)<p><i>AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625837" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625837</a> - Oct 2016 (1 comment)<p><i>AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830478" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830478</a> - June 2014 (21 comments)
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.<p>The direct call-out is the reference to <i>The Mythical Man Month</i> by Fred Brooks.<p>In Unix, file creation is as simple as '>'<p>In OS/360, there's a long set of JCL that is required.<p>(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.)
On the differences between shipping software and hardware:<p>> You don't demand that a piece of hardware suddenly do a completely different function. But people do that of software all the time.<p>These days you're lucky if your hardware continues to do the function you bought it for, let alone gaining new capabilities!
It would be great if the example in <a href="https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?t=521" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?t=521</a> still worked.
I instinctively went to add this to my tech fave videos on YouTube, and was proud to discover that I already added it so long ago I forgot I'd done it already.
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.
didn't see this previously when it's been posted 3-4 times every year for a decade.<p>You know you can enjoy the video (as we all do) without upvoting it.