Author: Brian Kernighan
Date read: 2022-03-03
For me as a software engineer—and a geek—, learning how Unix prevailed was an absolute joy, specially by someone who was directly involved in Unix's history.
This book tells you how Ken Thompson invented the Unix operating system in 1969 on a PDP-7 device, out of the ashes of MULTICS, which was a failed OS attempt by MIT, GE and Bell Labs.
Later on when Dennis Ritchie invents the C programming language, they join their efforts and rewrite Unix in C to make it portable.
Many talented people in Bell Labs (including the author himself) create useful tools (e.g., Shell, Yacc, Lex, Make, Sed, Awk) to enrich the Unix environment.
I was shocked by the amount of contributions that Ken Thompson has made to the software world: B, Pipes, Grep, Regex, UTF-8, Go, of course Unix itself and many more.
Bell Labs seemed to be a factory of ideas and inventions. I believe this was the result of gathering talented people together, giving them a sustainable environment (socially and economically), and letting them do whatever they are interested in.
Brevity is one of the things that I liked about this book, because it wraps up Unix's history in about 180 pages, with many photos. This made reading the whole book a pleasure.
Rating: 5/5