Ken Thompson recalls Unix's rowdy, lock-picking origins

It's interesting and heartwarming to see how similar the spirit of many successful software projects was. Creative collaboration, open play, extremely high trust, by people who really intrinsically love what they do.

It goes against so much of the MBA-worldview and bigcorp offices.

Unix, GNU, Linux, early Python, early Rockstar Games etc.

The early users being patent secretaries, then "administrative kind of stuff, typing in trouble tickets," and adoption spreading because people liked it, is kind of cool. That creates different kinds of pressures than a big top-down-dictated project does, maybe healthy pressures: if you're going to play with a new idea about how things should work you can't break things; you need the thing running reliably for the people using it day-to-day. One way you can have huge projects fail is by fiddling around too long without contact with reality.

Given Linux's origins--"(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"--it's interesting that early UNIX, in this telling, was also not the big professional push to build the OS of the future so much as just some folks trying to cobble something useful together (though of course, that they were playing around in Bell Labs gave their experiment some great advantages!).

One of my favorite Ken Thompson hacks is one where he demonstrated how a backdoor could be introduced into a compiler in such a way that it would be difficult to notice https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack

Okay, so weird and maybe unrelated question.

There's this hardcore punk album from 1981 called "This is Boston not LA." On it, there's a track called "Radio UNIX USA" by the FUs.

I can't find ANY origin stories about the title. The lyrics have nothing to do with UNIX either, weirdly enough. However, this band is from Boston, and MIT was doing UNIXy stuff at around this time.

Anyone have any clue as to the origin for this track?

"Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernihgan" is also an excellent read.

It's interesting how so many of the early tools were designed to create "communities" (mesg, talk etc.). The semi open nature of the platform really encouraged it too. It's nice to be able to cd into someone else's home directory and look at their files.

I hadn't heard about the stolen security boots. It's interesting that it was resolved by a peer-to-peer negotiated settlement for the security guards to violate official corporate policy, rather than through management.

> Thompson remembers designing the Unix filesystem on a blackboard in an office with Rudd Canaday — using a special Bell Labs phone number that took dictation and delivered a typed-up transcript the next day.

Fancy :), this just became normal for the general public in the last couple of years. I assume of course that there was a secretary at the end of the line, not AI. But it's not completely unthinkable, Bell Labs did do very impressive things in text-to-speech at least.

Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East in 2019 > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o

Birth of a serious change (and leadership) always requires questioning of status quo and probably a bit of rowdy, jungle instincts.

back in the days when beards were serious beards

If you want to see Ken's contributions to Go, they are all there in Git. There's some fun stuff there (no spoilers). :)