Details vary in different telling, but all agree that Unix operating system co-creator Ken Thompson developed grep while at Bell Labs. His impetus came from a request by a manager for a program that could search files for patterns.
Thompson had written and had been using a program, called ‘s’ (for ‘search’), which he debugged and enhanced overnight, the story goes. They nursed it and rehearsed it and grep sprung forth. “g” stands for “global,” “re” stands for “regular expression, “p” stands for “print.” To get something to display on screen in those days you used “print.” Thompson coming up with a software tool, and sharing it throughout the office, and perhaps beyond; to me that captured a moment in time.
I picked up on this based on an assigned mini-series for Data Center Knowledge. Also in this mini-series was a look at the roots of the kill command and the birth of SSH security. [links below]. I knew bits of the early Unix history but had to dig for this one.
My journalism jobs back in the ‘80s had a small dose of Unix news. At the time, it was trying to break out of an academic world of flannel shirts and blue jeans – the critics might have added birkenstocks clogs with some derision – and into the straight laced world of corporate computing. It appeared on oraymini computers and even personal computers. Its issue then was it was splintered in the market, with IBM, Sun, H-P and many many others fielding slightly different versions. I’m omitting DEC here. The company was headed by someone who was religiously opposed to Unix.
Looking into the background of simple grep history was eye opening. [Simple? Seems simple now, but ‘search’ was then in itself a discovery!] There are YouTube retrospective interviews with grep creator Thompson that were enlightening. He is pretty unassuming and laid back, but assertive enough to let you know he is a problem solver and a smart one. Ego in check.
Somehow this stood out in relief compared to today’s hotshots of high tech. Day after day the news feed feels with the heroic musings or doings of Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman.
Is it fair to say that Unix and programming mores of the time contrast to what goes on these days in the name of high tech? I’m inclined to posit that.
As with any technology era, what goes on in the host society has a lot of influence on how the bits and bytes come out of the processor. It’s not good to idealize the past, for sure. People don’t change that much over time. Different styles rise in the currents, however. One wonders how the style of Bell Labs of yore marks against an AI Unicorn lab of today.
Unix co-creator Dennis Ritchie has articulated how he saw things. He seems to have felt the young programmer army was working together, finding a joy in figuring things out. Or, as people used to say: Or whatever.
[I had the good fortune to meet Ritchie at an Interop or Comdex – he was promoting the Plan 9 OS, which Bell Labs decided to send into the world – mostly for kicks, I suppose. I wrote a piece thereafter: Will There Ever Be Another OS? I should have been studying Linux!]
On Unix, Ritchie has said: ‘What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form.”
I think that’s true. And it’s a tonic, at least compared to the vinegar that rides with some of today’s high-tech crusades.
Unix forged the roots of Open Source. It grew up in an era where the communal endeavor of creation was the soul of the software process. How open-source fares in the software developments of Generative AI should be closely watched.
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The above pic shows not Ritchie or Thompson but Thomas Kurtz, the co-author of BASIC, who has recently passed. It’s here as I have clear recollection of such basements.