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

123 points by joonehur 8 hours ago on hackernews | 14 comments

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

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

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

> 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.

tosti | 4 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.

: stackghost | 3 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.

BikiniPrince | 6 hours ago

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

mixmastamyk | 3 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.

rjsw | 2 hours ago

Colossus used valves.

: defrost | 2 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.

lioeters | 3 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...

alexfortin | an hour 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.

JdeBP | an hour 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...

BiscuitEater546 | 46 minutes ago

Good I like it

Gud | 15 minutes ago

Bill Joy, the unsung hero of the computer revolution.