Brian Kernighan Reflects on Unix: A History and a Memoir

In this special episode of Book Overflow, Brian Kernighan once again joins Carter and Nathan, this time to discuss his book Unix: A History and a Memoir. Join them as Brian recounts what it was like working at Bell Labs, how it feels to have contributed so much to the world of computing, and whether or not he thinks creating a big idea like Unix is still possible! -- Videos mention in this video -- ‪@Computerphile‬ Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle (UTF-8)    • Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracl...   -- Books Mentioned in this Episode -- Note: As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. ---------------------------------------------------------- Unix: A History and a Memoir https://amzn.to/3YVnlYv (Paid Link) On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver https://amzn.to/4hGnIxo (Paid Link) Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin by Howard Markel https://amzn.to/3UKEfGP (Paid Link) ---------------- 00:00 Intro 02:18 Bell Labs, Unix, and What prompted the book? 07:02 Doug McIlroy and the Simplicity of Unix 13:12 Was Unix inevitable? 22:00 Getting Scrappy, PIP-11, and document preperation 27:35 tools, composability, and patterns 33:04 awk, snobol and associative arrays 35:27 Small Teams and Big Ideas 41:58 Plan 9 and UTF-8 49:41 Life After Bell Labs 54:00 Humilty and Collaboration at Bell Labs 55:22 Long Term Influences of Unix (pipes, programmable shell, composition of tools, stdin, stdout, stderr) 59:46 Closing Thoughts --- Join our Discord Server:   / discord   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5kj6DLC... Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... X: https://x.com/bookoverflowpod Carter on X: https://x.com/cartermorgan Nathan's newsletter https://rojoroboto.com/newletter --- Book Overflow is a podcast for software engineers, by software engineers dedicated to improving our craft by reading the best technical books in the world. Join Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups as they read and discuss a new technical book each week! The full book schedule and links to every major podcast player can be found at https://www.bookoverflow.io