My copy of the book "UNIX" published in 1985, i.e. the Italian edition of "The UNIX Programming Environment" by Brian Kernighan and @robpike The English edition of this classic was first published 40 years ago in 1984.
Whenever possible I got the original English editions of computing books as the quality of Italian translations was usually low. This book is an exception and is pretty good.
I mean, What really is stopping me from dropping everything to dive head first into a completely new field and write a #UNIX#MicroKernel in #RustLang ?
I saw an ad for this CD set at a very low price in a computer magazine. I decided to give it a try, enticed by the low cost and this 'alternative solution to Windows', and in late 1996 I ordered this set.
When it arrived, I was fascinated (having never used a Unix or Unix-like system before) but a bit daunted by the lack of support for the main applications I knew. A few months later, though, I decided to give it another go and from that point, I never looked back. Whether it was Linux, one of the BSDs, or something similar (but Unix or Unix-like), I was not going back to systems like Windows.
My #ThrowbackThursday today is probably one of the most significant in my computing life.
Unix wishlist: A flag for tee(1) that will have it read from stdin and write into its output file(s) as fast as possible.
Currently, it will only read from stdin as fast as its own stdout can process the data, even if stdin could supply it faster.
Instead, if it wrote to the file(s) as fast as possible and serve stdout from these files, stdin could be depleted and closed faster, which is (e.g.) nice to the web server if stdin is curl or something.
This morning I wrote a #bash alias that switches into a repository directory, checks out the main branch, opens #macos Finder windows for two subdirectories, launches a new #firefox Nightly window, waits a second, and then opens four URLs as tabs of that new window, so yeeeeaaaahhhh, I guess you could say the day is going pretty good so far. #unix#script#nerd#hashtag
I got a Raspberry Pi 5 a while ago, and little by little I'm adding some software I'll find useful (and also figuring out how the darn OS works; I've never used Unix-like OSes before).