my grandmother was a programmer at bell in the early 60s and 70s. really curious if she had hands on any of this. wish she was still around to ask lol.
you only realize how cool your grandparents were after they’re gone.
I downloaded the tarball and had a look through it. Almost everything has source code included, which is pretty cool to see.
There’s an entire C compiler from 1972, bootstrapped to be written in C. There was also a SNOBOL III compiler written in C, and a Fortran interpreter in C (only 462 lines!), and every unix command like ls,cd,echo,cat,grep,etc…
Unsurprisingly grep was written in assembly, but it’s source is there.
There’s also a games folder, but unfortunately these look like they’re just binaries:
bj, chess, cubic, moo, ttt, wump
I’ll have to load up a pdp11 emulator later to see what they are.Thank you for sharing the insights. I heard bj is a good game.
Your mom loves it
Nancy Reagan still has the high score
Monica Lewinsky is right on her heels.
The word is that Julia Roberts took the title in the 90s
Hunt the Wumpus! A true classic.
(I’m serious. Try it. It’s fun. I think it’s in the bsdgames package.)
Wow. SNOBOL was one of the coolest, Stange languages.
TIL that slashdot is still around. XD
Its been though several hands and the latest ones love floating bug the fuck out of you ads. I used to have a button on for decades to disable ads due to me being a regular contributor. The latest owners took that away.
Tape image: https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw
Extracted filesystem: http://squoze.net/UNIX/v4/README
They wrote this without googling anything.
They were chatting with ELIZA and vibe coded the whole thing
If you had a question about C, you would just consult K&R, and I don’t mean the book
I worked at Bell Labs in the 90s, on wireless stuff, but we were still using the “in house” cfront compiler at the time, and would e-mail the compiler group, which included Bjarne Stroustrup, with issues sometimes. I learned C++ from his book before I joined Bell Labs, so that was a bit of a holy shit moment for sure for me then.
Kernighan, Ritchie and Thompson all still worked at Bell Labs as well at the time, but the company was huge then, and they were all in a different location from my team, so I never had any opportunities to meet them.
Hello World in 1974: echo.c
main(argc, argv) int argc; char *argv[]; { int i; argc--; for(i=1; i<=argc; i++) printf("%s%c", argv[i], i==argc? '\n': ' '); }Bloat, they wasted an extra integer operation with
argc--.I think it’s actually quite elegant. No matter what it has to skip over argument 0 which will be the executable name
echo.
If the subtraction was removed and the loop changed to<, it would then need to do an addition or subtraction inside the loop to check if it’s the last argument.The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change
var++andvar--into++varand--varwhen the initial values aren’t needed.As compiler optimisations go, it’s a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.
Well, good news, the source code is right there. Someone can go check (it probably won’t be me)
I was going to guess the same regarding the time period.
Or they just drop the =
They wrote this without autocompletion or syntax highlighting.
They had PAPER NOTEBOOKS cheats
They also used the classic they knew what they were doing shortcut.
It’s actually really easy when you get to make everything up as you go along. Like the transistor, and C, and Unix. That place was something else. The modern world was born in NJ
The modern world was born in NJ
* looks at modern world *
Yeah, that tracks.
Yea I thought about having ‘for better for worse’ in the post, but I lived in NJ so I’ll let them have a little glory for once
This is Unix v4 I think. The programs mentioned were also on later versions and I thought not hard to find. V6 sources are all online somewhere. I also expect some of those v4 programs would have been in assembler rather than C.
