The C Change

C and UNIX are at the root of modern computing. Many of the
languages we’ve covered this season are related to or at least
influenced by C. But C and UNIX only happened because a few
developers at Bell Labs created both as a skunkworks project.
Bell Labs was a mid-twentieth century center for innovation. Jon
Gertner describes it as an “idea factory.” One of their biggest
projects in the 1960s was helping build a time-sharing operating
system called Multics. Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin explains the hype
around time-sharing at the time—it was described as potentially
making computing accessible as a public utility. Large teams
devoted years of effort to build Multics—and it wasn’t what they
had hoped for. Bell Labs officially moved away from time-sharing
in 1969. But as Andrew Tanenbaum recounts, a small team of heroes
pushed on anyways. C and UNIX were the result. Little did they
know how much their work would shape the course of technology.


That's all for Season 3. If you want to dive deeper into C and
UNIX, you can check out all our bonus material over at
redhat.com/commandlineheroes. You’ll find extra content for every
episode. Follow along with the episode transcript. Subscribe to
the newsletter for more stories and to be among the first to see
announcements about the podcast. See you soon for Season 4.