F/OSS Comics #13: BSD Unix, Part 3 – The Beginning of BSD Unix

Posted by joonehur 10 hours ago

Counter155Comment17OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by JdeBP 3 hours ago

Marshall Kirk McKusick, mentioned in this comic, was still committing changes to FreeBSD as of last August:

* https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/sbin/restore?id=2cefae4c...

Comment by alexfortin 4 hours ago

Looks nice, too bad though it doesn't expose any sort of RSS/Atom feed, if I can't add it to my feed reader I'll soon forget about it.

Comment by benrutter 2 hours ago

Ah, that's a shame! I was about to look for the RSS feed too - especially since the cross-over of people who'd be into this comic series and rss/atom is probably pretty large.

Comment by tcnevin 15 minutes ago

I like this. Not sure if it matters too much but reverse order made me pause.

Comment by getfacl 26 minutes ago

One of these days I need to write up my non-mythology version of the BSD story and dispel some of the popular retcons.

Comment by mixmastamyk 6 hours ago

Neat. Found an issue in chapter 3, first sentence says electronic computers were during WWII, but they were electro-mechanical… they used relays. Vac tubes came later, ENIAC was finished after the war finished, for example.

Comment by rjsw 4 hours ago

Colossus used valves.

Comment by defrost 4 hours ago

They're likely thinking of Zuse's Z3 of 1938 rather than the somewhat later Max Newman / Tommy Flowers build of 1941-1943.

Comment by lioeters 5 hours ago

Love this. The human touch of illustration, and classic stories from computer history. I'm going through the entire series up to now, it's great.

My favorite panel so far: What is a real programmer? https://fosscomics.com/posts/6.%20The%20Origin%20of%20the%20...

Comment by Gud 2 hours ago

Bill Joy, the unsung hero of the computer revolution.

Comment by jolmg 9 hours ago

> bundling the Pascal system with ex, a line editor developed from em.

What's em? I thought it was developed from ed.

Comment by nagaiaida 9 hours ago

https://www.coulouris.net/cs_history/em_story/

Comment by stackghost 7 hours ago

> By the way, 'em' stands for 'editor for mortals' - I christened it that after Ken Thompson visited our lab at QMC while I was developing it and said something like: "yeah, I've seen editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them, I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing".

Literally an insane opinion.

Comment by tosti 7 hours ago

To be fair, I sometimes edit files with ed. Especially the ones I've seen hundreds of times (eg /etc/ssh/sshd_config).

Nowadays we're dealing with orders of magnitude more code. Back in the day it would've been fine for the programs you wrote yourself.

Comment by stackghost 5 hours ago

>Back in the day it would've been fine for the programs you wrote yourself.

I mean, maybe if your code was simple enough that you could keep the entire state in your head at once, but we're talking about guys writing memory management routines and OS kernels. In C. With no LSP, no syntax highlighting, no linting, etc.

It's one thing to say "my hardware is too limited, I can't fit all that extra context into memory", but to be working with that tech stack and to say "I actively choose not to see the context around the line of code I am editing at this instant in time" is just obtuse, no matter how many programming languages you've invented.

Comment by BikiniPrince 9 hours ago

It absolutely needs like 52 panels. I hope they integrate some politics by panel 1025.

Comment by BiscuitEater546 3 hours ago

Good I like it