6 HN users recommended this documentary5 months2015–2024score 5.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN commenters recommend it as a demonstration of the Unix philosophy, with small tools composed through pipes.
A 1982 AT&T Bell Labs film for students about the Unix system and how it can be used practically. It includes Lorinda Cherry building a talking calculator by piping together Unix commands, and a spell checker made from Unix utilities.
“both are really excellent demonstrations and eludications of the Unix philosophy and mindset” (HN, 2015)
That was a great watch...and if you keep on watching for a few more minutes, you can watch Lorinda L. Cherry rewrite his implementation using Unix pipes and then creating a talking calculator. The screencasting technology wasn't quite there yet ;), but both are really excellent demonstrations and eludications of the Unix philosophy and mindset that is pretty much unchanged and invaluable ~34 years later [this video]
Demonstrates the Unix philosophy via pipes and a talking calculator.
Others might also find interesting this video from 1982 where Brian Kernighan demonstrates building a simple spell checker using UNIX command line utilities: [this video]
Kernighan builds a spell checker from UNIX utilities in 1982.
Also I found these fascinating: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) has a lot of history and takes you back in time.. [link] Brian Kernighan 'interviews' Ken Thompson (2019) - Ken telling stories. They're both very funny, a very entertaining video, some stories I (and even Brian) hadn't heard. [link] UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use (1982) [this video] Also the other day I read in the AWK book that it was mainly inspired by SNOBOL4, so looked at some SNOBOL4 books from archive.org, from 1970-2 and just before, slightly earlier than Unix history takes you back. One tells you how to organize your punch cards to feed in the program.. Another had a bibliography with many dozens of SNOBOL books. It was widely used by people in the humanities apparently; like AWK it was at home dealing with words and text.
They really were. Here's a version of that video that includes Lorinda Cherry writing a talking calculator by piping together 3 unix commands. [this video]
Includes Lorinda Cherry building a talking calculator from piped commands.
Unfortunately I think plan9 only remains this way by keeping the people who use it small, being elitist and somewhat unwelcoming[0]. That's not to say I wouldn't also recommend spending a weekend messing around. I was recently having a conversation about the unix philosophy on reddit[1]. As nix and software built for nix became more and more mainstream it becomes harder and harder to keep with the unix philosophy and the philosophy of this post. [0]: [link] [1]: [this video]
URL with time: [this video] In the same video, there's a fun moment where they demonstrate constructing a simple spell checker out of unix primitives, and the demonstrator comments that "unix" is a word unlikely to ever appear in the dictionary: [this video] Of course, now it's in every dictionary!
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