Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

If you’ve ever combed boxes of old tech detritus in search of a nugget of pure gold, we know you’ll appreciate the excitement of discovering, in a dusty University of Utah storeroom, a tape labelled ...

I booted UNIX V4 (first C rewrite) in a PDP‑11 emulator. It feels tactile—no backspace, staggered print, slower typing, and it forced me to slow down. Classic Unix tools (ls, cat, ed, cal, dc) and ...

A fascinating little point made in a much longer piece about the smartphone wars. One that makes me wonder whether Unix can now be considered to be the most successful operating system of all time.

Turns out freedom and flexibility are great for coding.

Linus Torvalds once said, in reference to the development of Linux, that he “had hoisted [himself] up on the shoulders of giants.” Among those giants, Dennis Ritchie (aka dmr) was likely the tallest.

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