That was so over my head.

I was actually wondering if anyone else had heard of Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson... this video is going to be more interesting to people with a comp sci background (or at least a Unix or linux background).

These are the guys from Bell Labs who used a spare minicomputer to write an operating system and a sort of word processor or computerised publishing system in the 70s, before you could just buy a word processor.

The system had some interesting features, like being more portable than was normal of operating systems before it (the subject of this video) and its habit of treating every file as a text file (previous operating systems tended to treat a text file as different to a database file as different to a video file for instance).

I'm sure there are videos around here somewhere that explain it.... I know computerphile had another interview about the typesetting part:

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Reverse-engineering-the-Linotron-202-fonts-at-Bell-Labs

I haven't watched this video on Unix, but it's very likely *related=http://videosift.com/video/AT-T-Archives-The-UNIX-Operating-System too.

Reverse engineering the Linotron 202 fonts at Bell Labs has been added as a related post - related requested by oritteropo.

AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System has been added as a related post - related requested by oritteropo.

It's kinda hilarious that everyone knows who Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are, while K&R are responsible for the language that's used on practically every computing device on the planet.

Moving this video to oritteropo's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

*discard

Discarding this post - discard requested by original submitter oritteropo.