UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?
(2023/03/17)
- Reference: 1679067009
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/03/17/ken_thompson_is_a_maccie/
- Source link:
Last weekend, the SCALE conference came back from the pandemic with a bang: Ken Thompson as keynote speaker. In the Q&A at the end of his talk, Thompson made a surprising confession.
Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson was one of the developers of [1]MULTICS, the ancestor of and inspiration for UNIX . He also developed Space Travel in 1969, arguably one of the first video games, and then ported it from MULTICS to GECOS… and then to a spare PDP-7 that was knocking around the lab, in the process creating a set of development tools that he and [2]the late Dennis Ritchie subsequently turned into an operating system they called UNIX.
He also [3]co-designed and co-wrote Plan 9 from Bell Labs , the better-architected successor to Unix. Plan 9 failed to displace its much more primitive forebear, but it's [4]still being developed today . He then went on to design Plan 9's CPU-independent successor, [5]Inferno . Although Thompson is now 80 years old, he most recently worked at Google, where he co-developed Go… although his hiring caused problems: he [6]refused to take the company's mandatory C proficiency test , on the feeble pretext that he designed the C language.
[7]
Living programmers don't get much more eminent than this. He is a genius, who devised and built tools that have deeply affected millions of people – including UTF-8 encoding, possibly the first implementation of [8]regex regular expressions , and ed , which is, of course, the standard editor on UNIX. So it must have been something of a coup when the [9]Southern California Linux Expo 20x bagged Thompson as a keynote [10]speaker .
[11]
[12]
His talk is a little surprising in several ways, but all the same, it's very much worth watching. Thompson admitted to suffering badly from stage fright, and struggled with moving through his slides. All the same, we recommend his talk. It's about recorded music, and doesn't really touch on Unix at all. It does have a lot about early digital music encoding systems and formats, Wurlitzer jukeboxes, player pianos, and much more besides.
[13]Unix is dead. Long live Unix!
[14]What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?
[15]A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer
[16]Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support
The real surprise is during the question-and-answer section at the end, though (at the 57¾ minute mark.) An audience member asked "What's your operating system of choice today?"
Thompson replies:
I have for most of my life – because I was sort of born into it – run Apple. Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more and more depressed… And what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious… But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay. And I've come, within the last month or two, to say: even though I've invested a zillion years in Apple, I'm throwing it away, and I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian, in particular.
The Reg FOSS desk can honestly say that we did not see that coming.
[17]Youtube Video
Bootnote
We feel that we should note that Mr Thompson has a long and storied history of trolling the computer industry, which [18]we have touched on before , notably his famous 1984 paper [19]"Reflections on Trusting Trust" [PDF], in which he revealed, during his [20]Turing Award lecture, that he had [21]planted an essentially untraceable back door in the original C compiler… and it was still there. ®
Get our [22]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2007/11/14/multics_source_code_released/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2011/10/13/dennis_ritchie_obituary/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/09/plan_9_goes_open_source/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/02/plan_9_fork_9front/
[5] https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our_test/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZBScrWbNPF8Pz@gi7T8MhQAAAMU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2006/03/24/java_regex_tutorial/
[9] https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/20x/about-scale
[10] https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/blog/announcing-keynote-speaker-ken-thompson
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZBScrWbNPF8Pz@gi7T8MhQAAAMU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZBScrWbNPF8Pz@gi7T8MhQAAAMU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/13/unix_workstations_lessons/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/05/new_atari_display_driver/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/23/universal_unix_tool_awk_gets/
[17] https://www.youtube.com/embed/kaandEt_pKw
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/25/developers_malware_vectors/
[19] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf
[20] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/thompson_4588371.cfm
[21] https://mananshah99.github.io/blog/2020/07/01/trusting-trust/
[22] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson was one of the developers of [1]MULTICS, the ancestor of and inspiration for UNIX . He also developed Space Travel in 1969, arguably one of the first video games, and then ported it from MULTICS to GECOS… and then to a spare PDP-7 that was knocking around the lab, in the process creating a set of development tools that he and [2]the late Dennis Ritchie subsequently turned into an operating system they called UNIX.
He also [3]co-designed and co-wrote Plan 9 from Bell Labs , the better-architected successor to Unix. Plan 9 failed to displace its much more primitive forebear, but it's [4]still being developed today . He then went on to design Plan 9's CPU-independent successor, [5]Inferno . Although Thompson is now 80 years old, he most recently worked at Google, where he co-developed Go… although his hiring caused problems: he [6]refused to take the company's mandatory C proficiency test , on the feeble pretext that he designed the C language.
[7]
Living programmers don't get much more eminent than this. He is a genius, who devised and built tools that have deeply affected millions of people – including UTF-8 encoding, possibly the first implementation of [8]regex regular expressions , and ed , which is, of course, the standard editor on UNIX. So it must have been something of a coup when the [9]Southern California Linux Expo 20x bagged Thompson as a keynote [10]speaker .
[11]
[12]
His talk is a little surprising in several ways, but all the same, it's very much worth watching. Thompson admitted to suffering badly from stage fright, and struggled with moving through his slides. All the same, we recommend his talk. It's about recorded music, and doesn't really touch on Unix at all. It does have a lot about early digital music encoding systems and formats, Wurlitzer jukeboxes, player pianos, and much more besides.
[13]Unix is dead. Long live Unix!
[14]What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?
[15]A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer
[16]Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support
The real surprise is during the question-and-answer section at the end, though (at the 57¾ minute mark.) An audience member asked "What's your operating system of choice today?"
Thompson replies:
I have for most of my life – because I was sort of born into it – run Apple. Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more and more depressed… And what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious… But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay. And I've come, within the last month or two, to say: even though I've invested a zillion years in Apple, I'm throwing it away, and I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian, in particular.
The Reg FOSS desk can honestly say that we did not see that coming.
[17]Youtube Video
Bootnote
We feel that we should note that Mr Thompson has a long and storied history of trolling the computer industry, which [18]we have touched on before , notably his famous 1984 paper [19]"Reflections on Trusting Trust" [PDF], in which he revealed, during his [20]Turing Award lecture, that he had [21]planted an essentially untraceable back door in the original C compiler… and it was still there. ®
Get our [22]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2007/11/14/multics_source_code_released/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2011/10/13/dennis_ritchie_obituary/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/09/plan_9_goes_open_source/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/02/plan_9_fork_9front/
[5] https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our_test/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZBScrWbNPF8Pz@gi7T8MhQAAAMU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2006/03/24/java_regex_tutorial/
[9] https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/20x/about-scale
[10] https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/blog/announcing-keynote-speaker-ken-thompson
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZBScrWbNPF8Pz@gi7T8MhQAAAMU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZBScrWbNPF8Pz@gi7T8MhQAAAMU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/13/unix_workstations_lessons/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/05/new_atari_display_driver/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/23/universal_unix_tool_awk_gets/
[17] https://www.youtube.com/embed/kaandEt_pKw
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/25/developers_malware_vectors/
[19] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf
[20] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/thompson_4588371.cfm
[21] https://mananshah99.github.io/blog/2020/07/01/trusting-trust/
[22] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
...on the feeble pretext that he designed the C language.
stiine
Why do I drink coffee while reading The Register??? Another keyboard bytes the dust...
I can't remember when I had such an enjoyably satisfying laugh!!!
Re: ...on the feeble pretext that he designed the C language.
MiguelC
Another one of the many perks of remote working: not having to withhold laughter when it's deserved!
Doctor Syntax
If there's any trolling it's the "because I was sort of born into it" about running Apple. It's not surprising that he finds Debian/Raspbian an accessible replacement for Unix. The questions following the talk do reveal two things. One is that the trojan is no longer in the C compiler. The other is the answer to "Who ate all the Pis?". He's got so many v4s its not surprising the rest of us can't get any.
Good luck...
trevorde
...on actually getting a Raspberry Pi!
Re: Good luck...
simonlb
As I've commented on here before I ordered an 8Gb Pi 4 on 20th December 2021. Current expected delivery is mid-October this year.
Yes, I know two years a long time to wait, but I comfort myself with the knowledge that people pay hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds on new cars and wait an equal amount of time for delivery, but my Pi 4 will still be more reliable and last longer. Probably.
I was expecting he'd compiled his own OS.
Luiz Abdala
Well, if the man created C, I was kinda hoping he'd have his own WIP pet project OS.
Joshing or not - I couldn't tell
3arn0wl
Actually, RaspberryPiOS is a well-considered construct : it's lightweight, customizable and stable.
Not a bad record. I'll give him some slack for being in the Apple camp for too long.
Lot's of otherwise smart people like the walled garden and some very good tools. Good thing that many of us couldn't afford their offerings or they'd be much more popular.
I actually started coding in "B" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)) after starting in assembler and FORTRAN on the GE architecture. It's been fun watching the evolution of these sets of languages and hardware capabilities for so many years.
Thank you, Ken.