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Originally Posted by alexander
Well, to start, there really arent that many ways you can write the kernel, and many pieces of Linuses code were similar to that of Thompson and Gates.
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Very good point! [Clarification: Bill didn't write the kernel! NT was designed by David Cutler who was the architect of VMS...I'm sure even Bill himself wouldn't take credit for it.]
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Originally Posted by alexander
If you really want to go deep into Unix, than you also missed a step also: MIT, AT&T and GE were working on an OS for one of their mainframes, I think it was called multis or multics or something like that, i beleive with the main goal to create a secure operating system, but they had a problem with performance so everybody split (but there were releases).....
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Yah, "MULTICS." Unix was a play on it which couldn't be used by Bell Labs cuz it was owned by the folks who paid Ken to write it, but the main point of both was a shared resource, multi-user OS (pretty novel in 1969!)...
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Originally Posted by alexander
Thompson wasnt one of the greater programmers....
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Ken would be modest enough to agree. One of the reasons his next OS was "Plan 9" named after the Ed Wood film...
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Originally Posted by alexander
I agree that old code is not rewritten, there were real programmers back then, that knew how to propperly program...
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Ha! We used to have contests to see who could write the most obscure single-line C programs...but I say too much...
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Originally Posted by alexander
although i havent read the books you proposed, I've read quite a lot about good programming, both style and habbits, as well as algorithm design and other things.
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Ya really should. Honest. Its good stuff! Donno what I'd do without my copy of Knuth! Too many people reinvent algorithms that they could pick right off the shelf....
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Originally Posted by alexander
Old code is much better than most of new code that is produced. The old ways to code are mostly gone, sadly, i mean look at Windows, I bet programmers at UCB whould have had good times going through all that code, lots of jokes and laughter would have been heard anyhow...
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We have! Its a hoot! BUT I will tell you that I worked for a company that was spun out of a CS project at Berkeley and the first thing we did was to REWRITE the ENTIRE thing. Grad students being paid almost nothing actually don't write the best code all the time!
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Originally Posted by alexander
yup i'm 3... Y2k
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I did have a client (and there were lots of reports of others) who had no source and only the machine code for a 30 year old application in 1999... Not pretty!
Warning: don't take anything I say too seriously....
Cheers!
Buffy
