Ken Thompson's wife took the baby to California for three weeks in the summer of 1969, and he used the time to write an operating system on a discarded PDP-7, partly so he could play a space game. Dennis Ritchie invented C so the system could move between machines. Doug McIlroy nagged for nine years until programs could be joined like garden hose, and got his pipes in one evening. A legal settlement meant AT&T could not sell the result, so it posted the source to universities.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, Brian Kernighan, Joe Ossanna, Bill Joy
- The idea it builds
- Small programs joined by pipes, so one program's output is the next one's input, and an operating system written in a portable language.