Interview with Doug McIlroy, tmp.0ut Staff #unix
[ What was the path that led you to working on Multics and Unix? ]
Oh, the usual thing is if you arrive at Bell Labs for a PhD, you're left to find out what you're going to do. At first, I played with integer linear programming and proved an incorrect theorem. Gomory at IBM proved the correct one, and called me one day to tell me about it.
...
Eventually Thompson finds this cast off PDP-7 and in three weeks builds the whole operating system.
[ That's wild. Three weeks?? ]
The assembler and the operating system. His wife was away for vacation.
...
But when I came up with a notation for the shell, he said, to my surprise, "I'll do it." And he did it in one night.
[ Of course he did. ]
... In the same night, he recruited Dennis. They realized that lots of programs which had named inputs and outputs would naturally be pipeable together. ... They changed a whole lot of programs that night, too. And the next morning they told us, it's working. Then we had an orgy of pipelines that were demonstrated. Look what I can do, look what I can do.
... By the end of the week, our secretaries were piping stuff to the line printer.
... Finally the, the pipe symbol itself came up. Because Ken was scheduled to give a talk about Unix in London. He was embarrassed to talk about this ugly notation. So he cooked that one up, and it really stuck. Ken gets a lot of credit for the symbol.
...
[ Gotcha. So what got you into programming Haskell? ]
Well, the thing is, it's a beautiful imitation of mathematics. And, um, I happen to be an addict of stream processing. Haskell is the best stream processing language I know of. With lazy evaluation, a stream is exactly like a list. And, and so there's some lovely demos you can do.
...
In Unix, the first manual occurred two years after the system.
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