My subject is some details surrounding the first white paper that Bell Labs published about Unix was "The Unix Time-Sharing System". I wrote what Ken Thompson was doing in between the end of Multics but before he found the "little used PDP-7" that he wrote Unix on, the difference between opening files on Multics and Unix, and what the "comfile" mentioned in the paper is.
I wrote this without AI involvement; I follow Unix history because I love knowing what the history is and what I can learn from it, and I love showing others these sorts of cool details.
> So what's a comfile? Clearly it's a shell script, yeah? So why're they called comfiles? It's short for "command files".
The vestige I'm amused by on my (BSD) systems is <foo>.S files. "S" for "Source". From the time when "source code" meant "assembly". Python, zig, C++, C, etc would be invented later...
I <3 the BSDs, and they're the reason that the quote from "A Research Unix Reader" stuck in my memory! I started on the linuxes, pre-systemd by many years, and remember system v init levels seeming straightforwards but weird. When I switched to FreeBSD and saw /etc/rc.local, it made far more sense to me. I never even _thought_ about what 'rc' might mean, though.
Seeing the quote from Doug McIlroy many years later lodged in my brain as answering a question I didn't even have, and I've been looking for a good reason to use it ever since.
There's a lot of cool small details like that in so many early white papers about Unix; I'm looking forwards to working through a good number of them over the next 12 months. I think next I'll look at Dennis Ritchie's paper on the impact of migrating Unix from assembly to C. It may give me good opportunity to cover the B->C change as background, which is fascinating to see.
I'm the writer of this essay.
My subject is some details surrounding the first white paper that Bell Labs published about Unix was "The Unix Time-Sharing System". I wrote what Ken Thompson was doing in between the end of Multics but before he found the "little used PDP-7" that he wrote Unix on, the difference between opening files on Multics and Unix, and what the "comfile" mentioned in the paper is.
I wrote this without AI involvement; I follow Unix history because I love knowing what the history is and what I can learn from it, and I love showing others these sorts of cool details.
I'd love to hear any feedback you might have :)
> So what's a comfile? Clearly it's a shell script, yeah? So why're they called comfiles? It's short for "command files".
The vestige I'm amused by on my (BSD) systems is <foo>.S files. "S" for "Source". From the time when "source code" meant "assembly". Python, zig, C++, C, etc would be invented later...
Was C really later? I thought UNIX had been ported before it made it to Berkeley.
I <3 the BSDs, and they're the reason that the quote from "A Research Unix Reader" stuck in my memory! I started on the linuxes, pre-systemd by many years, and remember system v init levels seeming straightforwards but weird. When I switched to FreeBSD and saw /etc/rc.local, it made far more sense to me. I never even _thought_ about what 'rc' might mean, though.
Seeing the quote from Doug McIlroy many years later lodged in my brain as answering a question I didn't even have, and I've been looking for a good reason to use it ever since.
There's a lot of cool small details like that in so many early white papers about Unix; I'm looking forwards to working through a good number of them over the next 12 months. I think next I'll look at Dennis Ritchie's paper on the impact of migrating Unix from assembly to C. It may give me good opportunity to cover the B->C change as background, which is fascinating to see.