I was reminded today of the time when I first met and fell in love with the C programming language and the UNIX operating system, which is written in C and is an extension of the C philosophy. Make no mistake, C and UNIX are not just computer programs. They are guides to how to think.
Developed at Bell Labs in the 70s by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and others, Unix has become the universal operating system. MacOS is based on it. Every web site you visit probably runs on Unix. It is difficult to imagine a time in the future when Unix will not be the basis of computing at every level, as it is now, from toasters to server farms. It ranks up there with the printing press for a reality-changing human invention.
I got out my old copy of the slim volume, The C Programming Language by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan. It’s a second edition from 1988. I think I’ll read it again. The writing is like the C language itself, clean, elegant, inevitable. Reading this book is therapy. Your mind comes out the other side reorganized.
From the copyright page:
“This book was typeset (pic|tbl:rqn|troff -ms) in Times Roman and Courier by the authors, using an Autologic APS-5 phototypesetter and a DEC VAX 8550 running the 9th Edition of the UNIX operating system.”