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values of β may give rise to dom!

values of β may give rise to dom!

Slide deck from !!con 2016 - the history and origin of the Unix v6 error message "values of β may give rise to dom!"

Jade Allen

May 07, 2016
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  1. Project MAC / MULTICS Joint venture between MIT, GE and

    Bell Labs. • Bell Labs dropped out in 1969 • GE’s computer business acquired by Honeywell in 1970. • Went on to become a commercial product.
  2. runoff •Probably written by Robert Morris (but maybe not, according

    to [2]) •J.F. Ossanna extended roff for photo typesetting (in assembler) •B. Kernighan rewrote roff in C in 1977 (also collaborated on eqn and pic)
  3. Users! •The first users of Unix were typists in the

    patent department. •That’s where the funding for the first PDP 11 came from.
  4. [2]

  5. [3]

  6. The Ethos of Unix 1. Do one thing – do

    it well! 2. Tool composition 3. Text is a universal interface (well until ) 4. Documentation
  7. If designers of a system are forced to use that

    system, they quickly become aware of its functional and superficial deficiencies and are strongly motivated to correct them before it is too late. Since all source programs were always available and easily modified on-line, we were willing to revise and rewrite the system and its software when new ideas were invented, discovered, or suggested by others. –Dennis Ritchie, [1]
  8. References • [1] ”The Unix Time Sharing System”, D. M.

    Ritchie, K. Thompson, Comm. ACM, July 1974. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/361011.361061 • [2] A Quarter Century of Unix, P. Salus, Addison-Wesley Professional, 1994. • [3] Commentary on Unix, J. Lions, Peer-to-Peer Communications, 1996. • [4] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V6- Snapshot-Development/usr/source/s2/mv.c • [5] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/odd.html • [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game) • [7] http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/ritchie_1506389.cfm and http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/thompson_4588371.cfm