[stubish]

At the time, before everything became Linux, all these tools and the shells used to glue them together were an incoherent mess. Was your glue sh, ksh, csh, tcsh, bash or something uncommon like zsh? Did your grep, awk and sed use the same regexp syntax as your text editor? Single letter command line options, all meaning something different to each tool. Dozens of domain specific languages (shells, awk, sed etc.) meant dozens to learn and keep in your head. And you needed it in your head, because finding the information you needed in the massive single document man file reference was a pain because hypertext links had not been invented yet (well, probably in Emacs, which was another tool like Perl that people used to avoid the command line nightmare).

[chx]

> or something uncommon like zsh

By the time our lord and savior zsh appeared on the scene Perl was already at Perl 3. And, to be fair, I do not think many used zsh before 2.1 which was some time 1991 fall and by then the Camel Book was out for half a year or something like that. So the pre-Perl and the we-use-zsh days do not really overlap.

When Perl appeared the absolute hotness was the version of Korn shell what later became known as ksh88. https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/tree/master/local/tool...

[timthorn]

> And you needed it in your head, because finding the information you needed in the massive single document man file reference was a pain

That's what the O'Reilly books were for, especially the Nutshell series.

[jghn]

I remember capturing every password at my university via "methods". Because we had a printer quota. In the summer when everyone was gone I printed out all the man pages (all the mans, the system libraries, etc) so I'd have a nice reference book. I made sure to make it so no one was charged any money.

The one thing people can't possibly fathom if they started coding after the mid-late 90s was how much we relied on the printed medium.

[chx]

I still remember when we measured the documentation IBM shipped with the mainframes not in pages but in yards it occupied on the shelves. It was a lot.

[cafard]

Oracle used to be hard on your lower back, within the last 25 years.

[fuzztester]

The Unleashed and Bible series of books come to mind. Waite group or Sams or so, publishers.

Rather Waite-y.

[jancsika]

Honest question-- why weren't the tools glued together or perhaps replaced entirely with the lisp inside Emacs? What was it missing?

[turndown]

While there are many possible answers, it eventually boils down to Unix being a C runtime and thus has a C culture. Lisp is from outside of this section of the world, so it simply had less adoption and support inside Unix land. Other languages, like sed, awk, and shell are not C but share its heritage(essentially, they were made by people close to the making of C.)

[shrubble]

Memory and CPU efficiency, since most systems were memory constrained. My first server had 128MB of RAM...

[chx]

> My first server had 128MB of RAM

Whippersnappers! :D

The first big iron I had the luck to work with was an IBM 3090 , essentially a gift from IBM, it handled the university entrance exams of the entire country of some ten million people and it had 64 MB of RAM. (It was also the first computer in Hungary permanently connected to the Internet via a leased line to Austria so it had an Austrian IP address. Hungary didn't have its IP region for two more years.)

I think the first machine with 128MB was a VAX 6510 a year or two later at another university. A little bit later, in 1994, CERN had gifted a VAX 9000 with an astounding 256MB of RAM.

To compare, the first server I installed Linux on had a grand total of 4MB RAM -- and that was one of the largest computers a small department at the university had.

It would be a long, long time before "128MB" and "mine" entered the same sentence.

[raiph]

Shades of the Monty Python sketch here, but the following is true...

4MB?!?

My first encounter with IBM kit was a, er, darn I'm not sure cuz I'm getting old, but I think it was a 4300? Not big iron in some senses, but still with a box that was something like 6-8 feet long iirc and definitely several feet wide and high. (And a bank of about 6-8 tape decks, each as tall as me, and two disk units, each the size of a washing machine, and so on.)

Its RAM? A massive 1 MB.

That IBM kit was the heart of the super new expensive upgrade in 1980 that cost something like 5-10 million pounds iirc to build, including a brand new building to house it and a team of programmers.

The older setup, which is where I was until its last days, was an ICL system that was expanded at the end of its life to a whopping 48KB -- yes, KB -- of RAM.

And that kit ran all the systems, internal (payroll, accounting, etc., etc.) and external (sales etc.) for the largest car dealership in the UK.

128MB? 4MB? Even 1MB? That was an unimaginably insanely large amount of RAM!

(Yes, it was very weird to be working with this physically enormous setup, and dealing with keeping it all cool enough not to halt for a half hour or so, through super human efforts when the A/C broke down, when the likes of PETs, Sinclair Z80s, and Acorn Atoms were a thing...)

[chx]

> including a brand new building to house it

Ha yes the aforementioned IBM 3090 was so big for installation they removed the roof of the building it was living in, craned it in place and put the roof the back. Bringing it up the elevator or stairs was impossible.

Much later, in the second half of the 90s, I remember the four of us carrying an IBM HDD -- I think it was your normal 5.25" drive but it needed four people because it was mounted on a vibration dampening base ...

[raiph]

> Much later, in the second half of the 90s, I remember the four of us carrying an IBM HDD -- I think it was your normal 5.25" drive but it needed four people because it was mounted on a vibration dampening base ...

Continuing the shades of Monty Python theme[1]:

I remember one of my first few nights being in charge of the new IBM kit (I was a "computer operator" back then, in 1980), leaning back in the fancy new chair at the desk with its fancy "virtual" teletypes (a couple "terminals" displaying the status of the OS with a CICS system), and showing off to an "underling" by swinging a long plastic slide rule or something stupid like that (I no longer recall), and me accidentally banging it on the desk. Right "near" a recessed big red button. Or perhaps "on" the button? As I snapped my head around to look at the button and begin to understand what I may have just done I heard an ominous series of whirring and clicking sounds coming from the cpu box, right near where there was an 8" diskette drive that wasn't supposed to be doing anything while the OS was running (it was just for starting the OS). Then I looked at the console... Uhoh. They didn't fire me but it took months before they decided to let me be "in charge" again with someone else actually hovering over me...

Fast forward to when I was a coder (BCPL) in a small software startup, during the second half of the 80s, presumably 10 years before you were carrying your 5.25" drive monster, I vividly recall someone bringing a 700MB hard drive back from a local computer store. It cost an astonishingly paltry 700 quid or thereabouts. A pound a MB!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

[shaftoe]

There's an old joke that emacs stands for Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping.

[fuzztester]

Eventually Munches All Computer Memory.

Other backronyms too.

[cpach]

Elisp is very much a niche language. For whatever reasons, the use of Elisp outside of Emacs is basically non-existent. Elisp is quite clunky, and AFAIK there hasn’t really been any big efforts to make it usable outside of Emacs. People who wanted Lisp outside of Emacs already had Common Lisp. (And Chez Scheme, and Scheme 48, etc etc.)