Quote:
Originally Posted by GTB_an_Owl
they certainly were Gary
so you dabble yourself - do you ?
geoff
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Hi Geoff,
I would like to think I only dabble but am probably guilty of a little more than that.
We host our own server but don't run Apache ourselves, we use a different web server.
With regards UNIX/Linux however, I have to admit to likely being a much older
hand than most.
My first exposure to UNIX was in 1977 and I have been continually using UNIX
and later Linux since 1978, effectively every day of my academic and working life.
The University of New South Wales School of Electrical Engineering & Computer
Science was the second UNIX installation outside of the United States (the
University of Wollongong I believe was the first).
I was a student of the late John Lions at UNSW. In his Operating Systems class in the
70's, John threw us all a copy of the 6th Edition UNIX kernel, plus a separate
commentary book he had written plus a copy of Kerninghan and Ritchie's
"C programming Language" plus a PDP 11 assembly language card.
It was a baptism of fire for us second year students. Fortunately, the School
of Elec. Eng and Computer Science at UNSW had by far the best computing
facilities and staff for any academic institution in the country. From day one, you
were thrown in front of a UNIX terminal with your own login and email and taught
PASCAL whilst at that other place up City Road across town,
the students were still using FORTAN on mark-sense cards.
Anyway, we were told we had to learn to program in C and completely read
and comprehend the UNIX kernel in 14 weeks to a level to pass a
written exam. It was by far the biggest program any of us had ever been exposed
to and John's lecture's would have him explaining not only each line of code
but the architectural decisions that went behind it. Most of us recognized UNIX
for what it was, a work of elegant and succinct beauty, written largely by only three
men out of Bell Labs. I guess if one were a musician, it would be like
picking up a Beethoven symphony manuscript and reading and comprehending it for the
first time. There is both a recognition of the inherent intellectual brilliance
of it as a work and the fear and trepidation at the time that one may never
be good enough to write something as good.
After I graduated, my first job was as a researcher at UNSW and many of my
friends in the department were in turn friends with the creators of UNIX, specifically
Ken Thomson, Brian Kerninghan and Dennis Ritchie. Many of my colleagues made
direct contributions to the UNIX kernel and the popularization of UNIX and
many went on sabbaticals to Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
I got to briefly meet Dennis Ritchie when he came out to visit and also guys like
Rob Pike, who was also at Bell.
So UNIX is something that is very much in my blood and when Linux came along
it was a natural progression. I've used UNIX/Linux every working day, ranging from
tasks as diverse as designing custom integrated circuits to writing our own real
time operating systems. I've also written device drivers for UNIX, including
under implementations such as SunOS. These things aren't always easy to
write unless you have a pretty solid grasp of the actual internal workings of
an operating system, so it is one of the reason guys that would know how to
write them use to be thought of by other software engineers as having
knowledge and power over some some sort of magical black art.
Those days are long gone and the power is in the hands of an enormous number
of people, many of whom were much younger than I was when first exposed to UNIX.
However, 33 years on from first using UNIX, I still never ceased to be amazed to learn
something new and it does not necessarily mean I know the answer to every
question - far from it.
Besides, that's what the "man" pages are for.
There is a Wikipedia article about the UNIX 6th Edition Commentary written
by John Lions and the UNIX folklore that now surrounds it.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%2...th_Source_Code
In 2002, UNSW dedicated garden to John Lion's where there is a plaque and
engraved annulus around the base of the largest tree that reads -
"Lions' Books inspired a generation of operating system designers".
See
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/JohnLions/ceremony.html
I was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time and was one
of those students. Having said that, it was a conscious decision at the time
to go to UNSW and not the other place as it was abundantly clear to me
when visiting both campuses on open day's that UNSW was clearly far ahead
in the teaching of computer science and engineering at the time.
Best Regards
Gary
