When giants roamed the Earth, when True Hackers carved the bits of the One True Operating System, Unix, in the Holy Language of C.
In their own words: Unix pioneers remember the good times (Network World)
We caught up with the pioneers who brought us the Unix operating system and asked them to share some memories of the early days of Unix development.
From Ken Thompson's prank with a white noise generator:
“OK, I started turning the volume up by one notch every week. I would walk through the office area at least once a week on the way to the cafeteria. By the time that the volume was up to 8, still no one had noticed it but, to me, it sounded like Niagara. Everyone in the offices was screaming at each other. At that point, I couldn't help but laugh. On questioning, I told my lunch buddies what was going on. The word spread like a virus and, the very next day, the panel was open and the amplifier was removed. I still have a mental image of two people sitting across a table from each other yelling at each other in a normal conversation.”
to Rudd Canaday's tale of management cock-ups
“I left because Ken, Dennis, and I had gone about as far as we could with Unix without a machine. But, when we asked for funds to buy a machine, we were told that BTL, which had just abandoned MULTICS, was not willing to fund another operating system. I believed management and left the Unix project to start a new research group (which built the back-end database machine). I've often said that was the last time I believed what my management told me. Ken and Dennis went to (I was told) the patent department and promised a system that would do their paperwork if they supplied a machine. That's why, I believe, the early Unix had so many text processing tools (nroff, troff, etc.).”
this is good history.