Post #4801469 · Elektrine

2026-09-22 04:20 UTC

For context, this is a draft copy of The UNIX-HATERS Handbook from two years before publication. It was presumably sent to Jay Lepreau for feedback and I think this is the only surviving copy. Jay worked with UNIX throughout his career and it was found among his papers, along with the UNIX V4 tape. I will be scanning it. Personally, I found the book to be quite a fun read. It's a bunch of sore losers to UNIX's success. The anti-forward by Dennis Ritchie is a treat. https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

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@thalia@discuss.systems 2026-09-22 04:32

When I read UNIX-HATERS a few years ago, it unexpectedly helped me fill a gap in regular expression history. In its chapter on Usenet, they complain about Larry Wall's rn newsreader. It introduced killfiles, which filter emails using regular expressions. Well, I had incidentally just been researching historical regular expression engines and trying to trace back the development of regular expressions in Perl 1.0. Since Larry Wall created both, it seemed likely that rn influenced Perl. It turned out that Perl adapted the engine from rn and ultimately from James Gosling's Emacs. Since Perl removed attribution comments, I don't think this had been established before. When I revisit that project, I'll need to update it for what I learned from James Gosling at SIGGRAPH. https://github.com/thaliaarchi/regexp-museum/blob/main/viewers/rn.md #unix #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

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