One of my favorite Ken Thompson hacks is one where he demonstrated how a backdoor could be introduced into a compiler in such a way that it would be difficult to notice
https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHackThe early users being patent secretaries, then "administrative kind of stuff, typing in trouble tickets," and adoption spreading because people liked it, is kind of cool. It puts different kinds of pressures on you than a big top-down-dictated project does, maybe healthy pressures: if you're going to play with a new idea about how things should work you can't break things; you need the thing running reliably for the people using it day-to-day. One way you could have huge projects fail is by fiddling around too long without contact with reality.
Given Linux's origins--"(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"--it's kind of cool that early UNIX, in this telling, was not the big professional push to build the OS of the future so much as just an effort to get something useful together (though of course being bown inside Bell Labs gave it a great advantage!).
Okay, so weird and maybe unrelated question.
There's this hardcore punk album from 1981 called "This is Boston not LA." On it, there's a track called "Radio UNIX USA" by the FUs.
I can't find ANY origin stories about the title. The lyrics have nothing to do with UNIX either, weirdly enough. However, this band is from Boston, and MIT was doing UNIXy stuff at around this time.
Anyone have any clue as to the origin for this track?
I hadn't heard about the stolen security boots. It's interesting that it was resolved by a peer-to-peer negotiated settlement for the security guards to violate official corporate policy, rather than through management.
Birth of a serious change (and leadership) always requires questioning of status quo and probably a bit of rowdy, jungle instincts.
Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East in 2019 >
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o