I can maybe understand that younger people view “Unix” == “open source” and “Linux”, but I’m a little surprised that they were surprised. The history is a little backwards.

OS X is built on top of the BSD source code (Berkeley variant of Unix), and Ken Thompson did a sabbatical at Berkeley, so OS X probably contains bits of his own code. (Obviously other open source BSDs do too.)

Whereas Raspian Linux doesn’t contain his code (except maybe ports of minor user space utils, like column).

At the risk of stating the obvious, Thompson developed Unix at Bell Labs before GNU or open source existed. I guess you can surmise that there’s a common ethos with research and open source, but I would expect Thompson to use something closer to what he invented, rather than choosing along the lines of open source vs. proprietary.

I guess it’s a little surprising to me that he went to Raspian Linux rather than one of the BSDs, but I’m sure there is some practical reason for that. Probably because of the audio support on Pi (I didn’t watch the talk yet).

FWIW I remember when Thompson / Pike / Cox and dozens of other Bells Labs alumni worked at Google, and my impression is that they somewhat reluctantly used Linux? Pike definitely thinks the Linux kernel interface is a huge mess, and the CLIs are a mess too.

In the 90’s (and some of them were hired at Google in the 90’s!) there was definitely the perception that Linux was for “amateurs” and wasn’t “real Unix”, although obviously the situation has changed immensely in the last 2 decades.

FWIW many 90’s dot com companies like eBay paid Sun or IBM for “real Unix”; they didn’t run Linux.

Though the design of Linux is still a sore point. New kernel features like containers are pretty gross, since now they’re the first to do many things.

I think they ported a lot of of Plan 9 stuff like the ACME editor to OS X so they could use it?

I don’t think they ported any of it to Linux, because they didn’t use it. Although I’d be interested in any corrections on that.

https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ - 2012

A bunch of Macs at home, Macs and Linux at work, plus of course the Google compute clusters. When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn’t connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn’t the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we’re still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.

That said, my two-year-old 11” MacBook Air is the only piece of computing hardware to make me happy since I can’t remember when. For what it does, as opposed to what my dream setup would be, it’s fast and light and smooth and comfortable.

There’s just too much new stuff coming out, this industry moves too fast. At least when you’re a bit older you learn to pretty effectively dismiss silly stuff as such. And even then occasionally something cool comes out but you don’t have the time and energy to learn it. So you file it away, knowing it may one day be a useful tool (hopefully not forgetting that “there was this thing” when the time comes that you need it).

Of course, once in a while you still get blindsided, and the “silly thing” was actually useful and takes over the world (e.g. I dismissed React based on one failed experiment, and dismissed git for having a shitty UI). And other times you do invest a lot of time into something promising and clearly superior to other options, only to see it get ignored and dismissed by others and it fades into obscurity (like in my case Git’s contemporary DVCS competitors, NetBSD, Scheme).

But you have to manage your energy in some way by investing time strategically, or you’ll burn out. For me, I’m fortunate that I spent so much of my younger years “believing in” Open Source and Linux over proprietary software and Windows/.NET, and later PostgreSQL over MySQL. Those choices paid off dividends (although being too dogmatic probably also cost me a lot of opportunities at the start of my career - in some way it’s better to be a bit more pragmatic and invest time when something you already deem good appears to be growing more popular).