[dwcnnnghm]

> Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible. Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembler and B interpreter for a mini-computer that ran a printer they were struggling with, in a couple of days, so that they could get it printing again. This blew Brian's mind.

For the next level up here's Ken (in a very interesting conversation with Brian Kernighan about the history of Unix) describing McIlroy:

> McIlroy keeps coming up. He's the smartest of all of us and the least remembered (or written down)... McIlroy sat there and wrote ---on a piece of paper, now, not on a computer--- TMG [a proprietary yacc-like program] written in TMG... And then! He now has TMG written in TMG, he decided to give his piece of paper to his piece of paper and write down what came out (the code). Which he did. And then he came over to my editor and he typed in his code, assembled it, and (I won't say without error, but with so few errors you'd be astonished) he came up with a TMG compiler, on the PDP-7, written in TMG. And it's the most basic, bare, impressive self-compilation I've ever seen in my life.

This story, by the way, leads into how Ken created B (and how that was eventually improved by Dennis Ritchie into C).

[0] https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o?t=2314

[herodoturtle]

That's really cool thanks for sharing.

I checked out that youtube link too - you might be interested to know that his t-shirt says "επιτέλους το κατάλαβα" which is Greek for "eventually I understood it" - I thought that was neat :)

[agbell]

Thats a terrific story! Another interesting thing is that they were often working on very practical problems, grounded to the real world. The second unix system, the PDP 11 machine was being used for patent applications, so they had to build text processing tools and also be very careful not to break anything that the patent clerks needed. I think this combination was the key, smart people and practical problems.

[vram22]

Yes. What I read somewhere is that the early Unix team (some of whom had just come off the Multics project) got the full use of a spare minicomputer that was in the Labs, to build an early protototype of Unix (may or not be the first one), only by promising their manager that they would build text processing software on top of it that would be useful for the Labs' patent and other text processing work. And they delivered. Some of that work became a software suite called Writer's Workbench, IIRC, and some of it became the powerful Unix command line filters and such that we still love and use today, such as cut, paste, join, diff, tr and more - "more" as in "etc.", not the pager tool, although maybe that one too, ha ha.

[vram22]

The list of tools I mentioned is not exact. Some may have been created later.