Nekenčiančiųjų UNIX knyga
UNIX haters handbook dabar galima parsisiųsti nemokamai PDF formate. Įdomūs ir juokingi skaitiniai, rašyti prieš nemažai metų (beje, tas PDF hostinamas Microsoft serveryje ;). Mėgstamiausia ištrauka: „Unix was not designed for the Mac“ (hmmm… kaip ten su MacOSX?) ir šis priedas apie tai kad Unix ir C buvo
sukurti kaip pasityčiojimas:
„In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for more than 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth’s ETH labs in Switzerland, and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users’ frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions.
„Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called „A.“ When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P(“\n”),R=;P(“|”))for(e=C;e=P(“_”+(*u++/8)%2))P(“|”+(*u/4)%2);
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other U.S. corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960s technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer.“
Prie viso šito dar galite apžiūrėti 1978 metų Microsoft visų darbuotojų bendrą nuotrauką.