Название: UNIX: A History and a Memoir
Автор: Brian Kernighan
Издательство: Independently published
Год: 2019
Страниц: 197
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 11.0 MB

The fascinating story of how Unix began and how it took over the world. Brian Kernighan was a member of the original group of Unix developers, the creator of several fundamental Unix programs, and the co-author of classic books like "The C Programming Language" and "The Unix Programming Environment."

Unix and its derivatives aren’t widely known outside a particular technical community, but they are at the heart of any number of systems that are part of ev eryone’s world. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and plenty of other services are powered by Linux, a Unix-like operating system that I’ll talk about later on. If you have a cell phone or have a Mac, it runs some version of Unix. If you have gadgets like Alexa at home or navigation software in your car, they’re powered by Unix-like systems too. If you’re bombarded by advertising whenever you browse the web, Unix systems are behind it, and of course the tracking that knows what you’re doing so you can be more accurately bombarded is likely to be based on Unix as well.

The book is written for anyone with an interest in computing or the history of inventions. It includes a certain amount of technical material, but I’ve tried to provide sufficient explanation that even if you don’t have much background, you can appreciate the basic ideas and see why they might be important. You can safely skip over anything that seems too complicated, however, so there’s no need to read every word. If you are a programmer, some of the explanations may seem pretty obvious and over-simplified, but with luck some of the historical insights will be useful, and the stories that go with it might be new and interesting to you.