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   Tom Lyon ✅ (aka_pugs@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Mar-2025 06:12:58 JST Tom Lyon ✅

   I'm celebrating my 50th year of using UNIX!

   Sometime in spring of '75, my friend Peter (sysadmin for the PDP-11/45) came around shouting "UNIX is Here! UNIX is Here!"

   I asked "What's a UNIX?" and he showed me the 1974 CACM article about UNIX.

   • Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: likes this.
   • Mr. Bill repeated this.
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     Tom Lyon ✅ (aka_pugs@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Mar-2025 06:12:58 JST Tom Lyon ✅

     in reply to

     At the time, the only time-sharing system at Princeton was APL\360 - which was very cool but very weird. And I had spent the previous summer wrestling with IBM's TSO which was not at all cool, or even weird - just bad.

     So UNIX looked very nice - file redirection! pipes! background processing!

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     Tom Lyon ✅ (aka_pugs@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 22-Mar-2025 08:08:51 JST Tom Lyon ✅

     in reply to

     UNIX arrived courtesy of Dr. Jeff Ullman and Bell Labs. Ullman and Al Aho at Bell were deep into their decades-long collaboration (see recent Turing awards), so Ullman convinced Princeton to adopt it.

     I remember it as being Version 6 of UNIX, a little ahead of the official release.

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     Tom Lyon ✅ (aka_pugs@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 22-Mar-2025 08:08:51 JST Tom Lyon ✅

     in reply to

     My nickname from high school was Pugs, or Pugsley, inspired by The Addams Family.
     My brother Jim, 3 years ahead at Princeton, made sure everyone knew me as Pugs.

     So Peter, as UNIX admin, gave me the userid 'pugs'. Which has been constant all these years!

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.