AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System [video] (1982)(youtube.com)
youtube.com
AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System [video] (1982)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
32 comments
The context should hopefully be clear to most, but the "other operation systems" that are being referred to as complex, with fussy filesystems and poor inter-process control, would be IBM's mainframe operating system OS/360.
The direct call-out is the reference to The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks.
In Unix, file creation is as simple as '>'
In OS/360, there's a long set of JCL that is required.
(For some sense of what JCL is like, the much-derided 'dd' command is in fact a bit of OS/360 JCL that was migrated to Unix, largely in order to read and write from and to IBM-compatible tapes and punchcards.)
The direct call-out is the reference to The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks.
In Unix, file creation is as simple as '>'
In OS/360, there's a long set of JCL that is required.
(For some sense of what JCL is like, the much-derided 'dd' command is in fact a bit of OS/360 JCL that was migrated to Unix, largely in order to read and write from and to IBM-compatible tapes and punchcards.)
Apart from the technical goodies, I really like the calmness in their voices and overall demeanor. Hard to see it in recent videos.
Does anybody know what's the cause of today's lack of calmness in voice and demeanor?
Yeah, I don't know. That struck me as well.
Because I am a closet luddite I'm going to suggest that they were unconcerned about a notification, text, call, or email interrupting them.
They knew the news was not going to arrive until the next morning (in rolled up paper form in their driveway), that if there were a bomb explosion or plane crash somewhere in the world they would hear about it in due time, they would go home soon and be disconnected from university/work and would crack open the book they had set down the evening before....
Because I am a closet luddite I'm going to suggest that they were unconcerned about a notification, text, call, or email interrupting them.
They knew the news was not going to arrive until the next morning (in rolled up paper form in their driveway), that if there were a bomb explosion or plane crash somewhere in the world they would hear about it in due time, they would go home soon and be disconnected from university/work and would crack open the book they had set down the evening before....
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More difficult to get funding if you’re not visibly exhibiting excitement about your creation.
From my point of view it's the proliferation of sources of (especially monetized) information competing for attention.
In the 1970s, major US cities would have ~10 radio stations, ~5 TV stations, 2 major newspapers, and no access to online content. It was not uncommon for people to spend an hour of more with their local newspaper each day, and significantly more than that on Sunday. From today's perspective, TV news felt somber. Even frightening cold war developments would be spoken about with the calmest of demeanors.
In the 1980s cable brought that to a few dozen channels and it was getting easier to get national newspapers (NYT, USA Today, etc.). The 1990s saw many cable systems with 100+ channels and people started going online in large numbers.
Now there are so many options in video (100s of TV channels, YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Disney+, ...), audio (countless podcasts), and written content (news sites, blogs, social media, ...) that trying to get noticed in order to make money often leads to more extreme content. If people are navigating through hundreds of options per hour, how else can you get a chance to be noticed? Think of things like angry shouting in cable news, click bait, and political "discourse" on Facebook and Twitter.
The most successful early examples of this (MTV and pro wrestling in the 80s/90s, shock jocks proliferating in the 80s/90s, Fox News in the late 90s, Twitter and Facebook before 2010, etc.) are old enough that people under 40 years old have always seen some form of it. People under 25 who are most grabbed by it have seen little else. When Twitch streamed Bob Ross for a week in 2015, many young people saw him as a rebel because his demeanor was so foreign to them. People tend to emulate the norms they see, so now you see various levels of it in content that isn't so desperate to get noticed.
Mike Judge (a significant part of MTV's success in the 90s) played out where this was heading in his 2006 film Idiocracy. I think it was intended as a cautionary comedy, but it increasingly feels like a prescient horror to me.
In the 1970s, major US cities would have ~10 radio stations, ~5 TV stations, 2 major newspapers, and no access to online content. It was not uncommon for people to spend an hour of more with their local newspaper each day, and significantly more than that on Sunday. From today's perspective, TV news felt somber. Even frightening cold war developments would be spoken about with the calmest of demeanors.
In the 1980s cable brought that to a few dozen channels and it was getting easier to get national newspapers (NYT, USA Today, etc.). The 1990s saw many cable systems with 100+ channels and people started going online in large numbers.
Now there are so many options in video (100s of TV channels, YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Disney+, ...), audio (countless podcasts), and written content (news sites, blogs, social media, ...) that trying to get noticed in order to make money often leads to more extreme content. If people are navigating through hundreds of options per hour, how else can you get a chance to be noticed? Think of things like angry shouting in cable news, click bait, and political "discourse" on Facebook and Twitter.
The most successful early examples of this (MTV and pro wrestling in the 80s/90s, shock jocks proliferating in the 80s/90s, Fox News in the late 90s, Twitter and Facebook before 2010, etc.) are old enough that people under 40 years old have always seen some form of it. People under 25 who are most grabbed by it have seen little else. When Twitch streamed Bob Ross for a week in 2015, many young people saw him as a rebel because his demeanor was so foreign to them. People tend to emulate the norms they see, so now you see various levels of it in content that isn't so desperate to get noticed.
Mike Judge (a significant part of MTV's success in the 90s) played out where this was heading in his 2006 film Idiocracy. I think it was intended as a cautionary comedy, but it increasingly feels like a prescient horror to me.
Because everyone would rather listen to an exciting and engaging speaker. Of course, a calm and reserved voice is interesting today because it is exceptional in the current environment. I think Lester Holt's delivery is a good compromise of calm yet engaging.
This is a scripted, edited, and produced video. It was probably created with a total production timeline of many months. It's both educational and promotional, and was probably used both internally and externally by AT&T.
As others have noted, quality video content was still comparatively scarce, there wasn't much competing content (and certainly little on-demand as today). Long slow introductions were an opportunity for either assembled or broadcast audiences to settle in for the programme, as opposed today where a single video creation is competing from the first second to establish its interest and credibility.
The people interviewed are also at the top of their professions and game. They're not fighting to establish credibility, or promoting themselves within a field (though they might well be engaged in politicking internally within AT&T for budget, status, and resources).
By contrast, much (though not all) of what's created today is:
- Unscripted
- Unedited, has very minimal editing, or is poorly edited.
- Competes against a tremendous set of alternative content.
- Has short production cycles.
- Is mostly produced by individuals trying desperately to prove their own relevance.
- Is often created by (or about) people who are far from proficient, knowledgable, or, in an increasing number of cases, even remotely sane.
There are exceptions on both sides, and we suffer from several biases: survival bias of old works (crap production tends not to be retained or surfaced), familiarity bias with new works (we don't appreciate what's current or easily available). There were certainly numerous charlatans and frauds on video and audio before 2010. And there are people today who put out high-quality content that's well-prepared, scripted, and produced (Tom Scott, Derek Muller, and Destin Sandlin of YouTube all come to mind). The sober stuff produced today competes poorly against all the hyperactive instant-gratification of today. Though on reflection, AT&T's production probably didn't rate highly at the time against game shows and soap operas either.
As others have noted, quality video content was still comparatively scarce, there wasn't much competing content (and certainly little on-demand as today). Long slow introductions were an opportunity for either assembled or broadcast audiences to settle in for the programme, as opposed today where a single video creation is competing from the first second to establish its interest and credibility.
The people interviewed are also at the top of their professions and game. They're not fighting to establish credibility, or promoting themselves within a field (though they might well be engaged in politicking internally within AT&T for budget, status, and resources).
By contrast, much (though not all) of what's created today is:
- Unscripted
- Unedited, has very minimal editing, or is poorly edited.
- Competes against a tremendous set of alternative content.
- Has short production cycles.
- Is mostly produced by individuals trying desperately to prove their own relevance.
- Is often created by (or about) people who are far from proficient, knowledgable, or, in an increasing number of cases, even remotely sane.
There are exceptions on both sides, and we suffer from several biases: survival bias of old works (crap production tends not to be retained or surfaced), familiarity bias with new works (we don't appreciate what's current or easily available). There were certainly numerous charlatans and frauds on video and audio before 2010. And there are people today who put out high-quality content that's well-prepared, scripted, and produced (Tom Scott, Derek Muller, and Destin Sandlin of YouTube all come to mind). The sober stuff produced today competes poorly against all the hyperactive instant-gratification of today. Though on reflection, AT&T's production probably didn't rate highly at the time against game shows and soap operas either.
Because nowadays they'd be called out for "lacking energy".
I've given it a bit of thought in the past, and my working conclusion is that people don't care about things unless they're sensationalized.
In a world where information is reaching maximum saturation, anyone with internet access has to learn how to separate themselves from the internet to some degree. This learned separation is the enemy of habit, and therefore the mutual enemy of people who make a living off of clicks/views/impressions. To get past that, you need to start using words that pry past our filter of mediocrity and go straight to the brain, or introducing topics that pique our curiosity. No longer is that tacit curiosity enough to make people sit through something, so in comes the buzzwords, exciting rhetoric and loud voices. Internet profiteering is about filing away everything superfluous, and focusing on being the loudest (or at the very least, most listened-to) one in the room.
In a world where information is reaching maximum saturation, anyone with internet access has to learn how to separate themselves from the internet to some degree. This learned separation is the enemy of habit, and therefore the mutual enemy of people who make a living off of clicks/views/impressions. To get past that, you need to start using words that pry past our filter of mediocrity and go straight to the brain, or introducing topics that pique our curiosity. No longer is that tacit curiosity enough to make people sit through something, so in comes the buzzwords, exciting rhetoric and loud voices. Internet profiteering is about filing away everything superfluous, and focusing on being the loudest (or at the very least, most listened-to) one in the room.
They spoke with great clarity and enunciation for sure. No filler words. I suspect, it also has to do with how audio was recorded, processed and mastered. It’s got that warm fidelity as if it went through a low pass filter.
On the differences between shipping software and hardware:
> You don't demand that a piece of hardware suddenly do a completely different function. But people do that of software all the time.
These days you're lucky if your hardware continues to do the function you bought it for, let alone gaining new capabilities!
> You don't demand that a piece of hardware suddenly do a completely different function. But people do that of software all the time.
These days you're lucky if your hardware continues to do the function you bought it for, let alone gaining new capabilities!
I love Brian Kernighan's teaching style. He is the K in "K&R C" and AWK.
It would be great if the example in https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?t=521 still worked.
It almost works.
- unique is called uniq, but you can write an alias. I would not be surprised if it was called unique in this video for presentation purposes and uniq already worked at the time.
- sort will work as is
- lowercase is tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' (you can write an alias).
- you need write programs makewords and mismatch and put them in $PATH (the current folder was probably in $PATH at the time but it's not anymore for security reason)
sort | uniq can be written sort -u.
But the gist of it is still accurate and still applies to today's unix-like systems, which is quite a thing for something that has more than 50 years.
- unique is called uniq, but you can write an alias. I would not be surprised if it was called unique in this video for presentation purposes and uniq already worked at the time.
- sort will work as is
- lowercase is tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' (you can write an alias).
- you need write programs makewords and mismatch and put them in $PATH (the current folder was probably in $PATH at the time but it's not anymore for security reason)
sort | uniq can be written sort -u.
But the gist of it is still accurate and still applies to today's unix-like systems, which is quite a thing for something that has more than 50 years.
I strongly suspect that a lot of the commands he's using there are either shell functions or small scripts (or just aliases, actually) to make the example simple to follow. For instance, unique=uniq, lowercase='tr [AZ] [az]' (I think?), etc. You could trivially rewrite it today with a little effort to remake those.
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There are some real treasures in the AT&T Tech Archives. I love this.
I instinctively went to add this to my tech fave videos on YouTube, and was proud to discover that I already added it so long ago I forgot I'd done it already.
Great video, can't wait to hear that ending song sampled into a future haircuts for men album
Those offices were super chic!
I so miss the straightforward, personality/attitude-free style of presentation and demonstration. Hopefully that style will have some kind of comeback. Simplicity and sincerity are best. A great piece of history.
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UNIX is a terrible and overrated OS.
ITS was better.
ITS was better.
didn't see this previously when it's been posted 3-4 times every year for a decade.
You know you can enjoy the video (as we all do) without upvoting it.
You know you can enjoy the video (as we all do) without upvoting it.
I've never seen it until a few days ago, then of course saw it here!
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