F/OSS Comics #13: BSD Unix, Part 3 – The Beginning of BSD Unix
215 points by joonehur 4 days ago | 30 comments
  • jolmg 3 days ago |
    > bundling the Pascal system with ex, a line editor developed from em.

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

    • nagaiaida 3 days ago |
      https://www.coulouris.net/cs_history/em_story/
      • stackghost 3 days ago |
        > 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 3 days 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 days 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 3 days ago |
    It absolutely needs like 52 panels. I hope they integrate some politics by panel 1025.
  • mixmastamyk 3 days 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 3 days ago |
      Colossus used valves.
      • defrost 3 days 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 days 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 3 days 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.
    • benrutter 3 days ago |
      Ah, that's a shame! I was about to look for the RSS feed too - especially since the cross-over of people who'd be into this comic series and rss/atom is probably pretty large.
      • pbronez 3 days ago |
        Sent a PR for this. Vibecoded, we'll see if the author finds that helpful or insulting...

        https://github.com/joone/fossbook/pull/8

        • joonehur 2 days ago |
          Definitely helpful! Merged the PR and published the site with RSS support. Thanks for contributing!
  • JdeBP 3 days 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...

    • kleiba2 3 days ago |
    • drewg123 3 days ago |
      He regularly attends BSD conferences like BSDCan and EuroBSD. He's one of the nicest guys I've ever met. Its always nice when you meet your heroes and they are amazing people.
      • pengaru 3 days ago |
        If you're a McKusick fan, there's a series of recordings from his classroom lectures about operating systems. I saw some on VHS ages ago in a group setting. They were quite amusing from what I recall, for such an otherwise dry subject.
  • BiscuitEater546 3 days ago |
    Good I like it
  • Gud 3 days ago |
    Bill Joy, the unsung hero of the computer revolution.
    • DonHopkins 3 days ago |
      Bill Joy’s Law: 2^(Year-1984) Million Instructions per Second:

      https://donhopkins.medium.com/bill-joys-law-2-year-1984-mill...

      >The peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a simple function of time. Specifically, S = 2^(Year-1984), in which S is the peak computer speed attained during each year, expressed in MIPS. -Wikipedia, Joy’s law (computing)

      >“C++++-= is the new language that is a little more than C++ and a lot less.” -Bill Joy

      >In this talk from 1991, Bill Joy predicts a new hypothetical language that he calls “C++++-=”, which adds some things to C++, and takes away some other things.

      >“Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs.” -James Gosling

      I also saw Bill Joy's much earlier talk at the 1986 Sun Users Group in Washington DC, where he announced a hypothetical language he wanted to build called "C++++-=", and that he talked about in subsequent presentations.

      I think that was the same talk when Bill said "You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar". More Bill Joy quotes:

      https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/slowlari...

      At Educom in October 1988, I was running rotating demos of NeWS, pie menus, Emacs and HyperTIES on a Sun workstation at the Sun booth, for whoever walked by...

      https://hyperties.org/databases/playground/sun-founders-big-...

  • getfacl 3 days ago |
    One of these days I need to write up my non-mythology version of the BSD story and dispel some of the popular retcons.
    • meekins 3 days ago |
      Mind sharing some dispel magic here?
  • tcnevin 3 days ago |
    I like this. Not sure if it matters too much but reverse order made me pause.
  • lproven 3 days ago |
    It's cute, but why is it a comic? The comic adds nothing to the narrative. It's a tweet-length text history with illustrations, not a comic in the sense of comic strip as medium.
    • embedding-shape 3 days ago |
      The website is fosscomics.com, they're all comics? They're comics because the author(s) wanted to create comics, not sure how this would be hard to grasp.

      Most documentaries could be blog posts people can read in 10-15 minutes, yet the medium persists. A mystery? Probably not.

  • happosai 3 days ago |
    A lot of people in fediverse would enjoy these. Consider creating an account on techub.social or any of the other tech/foss oriented mastodon instances.
  • analog8374 3 days ago |
    Good comic. Good drawing etc.
  • kps 3 days ago |
    https://fosscomics.com/posts/12.%20BSD%20Unix%20Part%202%20-... — “Coding's a lot more fun in visual mode.”

    Coding in visual mode would be no fun at all on a Tek 4014¹. It's a vector storage tube and can't selectively remove characters from the screen.

    Should have drawn an ADM-3A².

    ¹ https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/4014

    ² https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:Lear_Siegler_...

  • wdr1 2 days ago |
    Well done! I went back & read the first two as well. I really enjoyed all three.