Ken Thompson is a singularity (Brian Kernighan)

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#unix #history #opensource #softwaredevelopment #softwareengineering #programming #podcast #oss #foss

[fennecbesixdouze]

This is a great clip.

Ken Thompson has a bit of "magician" to him. For example, the classic story about grep comes from Doug McIlroy, who said "Ken hammered it out in a night", and that story went on to legend, being repeated for example by dfb here on YouTube. But actually later on Ken revealed that he had grep squirreled away in his home directory and all he really did for Doug was fix a few bugs he had known about for a while, but he also happily let Doug believe that he had written it in a night.

A lot of the stories are this kind of magic, where Ken has been happy to let people do their own embellishing.

I think the most notable thing about Ken was that he was just a total obsessive workaholic on his own time, no real career ambitions, just an obsessive interest in everything computers and electronics and software. He spent every waking hour working on stuff out of his own interest and motivations. The bulk of UNIX before that famous 3 week period was a file system he had written for the PDP-7 to help him run his videogame Space Travel.

[johnathanstevens]

I attended their interview at VCF and it was awesome to hear some of the stories from two long time friends.

[snotchy]

Wow I can't imagine having to do stuff in assembly without the internet

[ronj]

When I was young I became aware of his accomplishments as I learned unix in the early 80s. But I was surprised that he had the brain bandwidth to invent a hardware / software hybrid chess computer. And it would beat 4.7 (or 4.9 whatever). Most people are not going to be so creative in a few short years. Donald Knuth would be the other one that comes to mind.

[gofudgeyourselves]

i can't do a hello world without internet

[fennecbesixdouze]

Is the full conversation only available over audio?

[nkdcwkp]

thats because hes a binary maniac.. imagine this dudes childhood was solving arithmetic problems in binary.. like literally hes a walking digital computer.