[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.