Ken Thompson wrote Unix in a month

[jprad]

Quote from bali_survivor:

Talk about debugging something using punchcards.....

I'd bet that your dad debugged with paper and pencil before punching that first card.

There was no worse and humbling experience than going down to the "window" and having one of the operators hand your card stack back with an abend output...

 

[taclander]

Quote from bali_survivor:

When dad did his exams back in the mid 80's one of the papers he had to do was writing an OS in assembly language.

He also programmed in Algol, Fortran, Borland C (using a single sided 5.25 " floppy when the doulbe sided 360K / 1.2 M had not become commonplace at that time) and used punch cards in one of his jobs. Only two compiles a day were allowed for the whole of the computer department...... Talk about debugging something using punchcards.....

M.

Confession of an idiot. After a few projects using those damn punch cards I switched from Comp Sci. major to Bus. Finance. Never been real patient, but holy cow, handing those things in and getting them back because I messed up...%#@$%$!!!

 

[nitro]

Quote from rosy2:

.imo, anyone good uses the basics. but i have to admit intellisence has made me more productive while being totally ignorant at the same time.

Yeah, intellisense is very useful.

Here is a really neat application:

http://ironpython.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=SilverlightInteractiveSession

Type the code in the black area

import wpf etc...

into the console, and watch the SilverLight canvas on the right respond.

 

[jack hershey]

Quote from jprad:

I'd bet that your dad debugged with paper and pencil before punching that first card.

There was no worse and humbling experience than going down to the "window" and having one of the operators hand your card stack back with an abend output...

024 or 026....LOL....

Ever have a security person drop a box of cards on the way to a presentation??? lol

 

[Random.Capital]

"Unix" then meant something entirely different than "unix" today.

We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"

First version was something like 12KB in size, very unstable, and couldn't support more than one user at a time (hence Multics -> Unics -> Unix).

 

[nkhoi]

Quote from jprad:

..
There was no worse and humbling experience than going down to the "window" and having one of the operators hand your card stack back with an abend output...

yeah, 'real' man carries 2 stack of cards instead of just one.

 

[EdgeHunter]

Quote from shortie:

"...but it would have taken Ken 10K years to write a Windows"

Well, actually, what we have in Windows To Date Is ... ADVANCED DOS... repackaged and resold... kinda...