This week I learned about Lion's Commentary on Unix.
- This week I learned about Lion's Commentary on Unix.
- It was an annotated copy of the 10k lines of Unix source code back in the 70's.
- Apparently it was a highly pirated book--only people with a license to Unix were supposed to be able to see it.
- The core 10k lines describe the elegant physics of the system and the three fundamental "particles":
- 1) User
- 2) Processes
- 3) inodes
- That's it! Out of those ideas you can get a universe of amazing things.
- The combinatorial power of those primitives also sets a ceiling of what is possible.
- Basically every computing system we've used for decades uses these fundamental particles.
- What other universes are possible?