Post by @jschauma@mstdn.social

2026-09-12 15:04 UTC

Advanced Programming the #UNIX Environment Week 1: UNIX History We cover the early days at Bell Labs, USL vs BSDi, the birth of the BSDs and #Linux, and how we got from Ken Thompson playing "Space Travel" on a PDP-7 to Unix running on your phone, fridge, and TV. https://youtu.be/3H7SQWTR6Dw Scroll along through it all here: https://levenez.com/unix/unix.pdf

Replies (3)

@jschauma@mstdn.social 2026-09-13 19:16

Advanced Programming in the #UNIX Environment Week 1, Unix Basics We write our first trivial program, which promptly segfaults and gives us a chance to explain function forward declarations and maneuvering man pages and set our default compiler flags ("-Wall -Werror -Wextra"), then proceed to write the most trivial versions of cat(1), ls(1), and even a rudimentary shell including a signal handler. https://youtu.be/w3spRzZ8bSA Slides: https://stevens.netmeister.org/631/01-basics.pdf

Open ##4801202
@thalia@discuss.systems 2026-09-12 15:09

@jschauma@mstdn.social I love that you’re covering the history to start! Also, Lévénez's UNIX tree is missing some early forks before V5. Unfortunately, not much is written about them and none survived. I should do something about this.

Open ##5061763
@paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange 2026-09-14 17:12

@jschauma@mstdn.social i miss BSDi. first started using it with version 0.6g and it was my primary server OS of choice until they were bought out.

Open ##5061764