Vocabulary of Action

Pathnames become memory.Streams pipe unseen.Prompts wait patiently Reading the The Unix Time-Sharing System (1974)Start Select Reset 📑Photo 365The Ministry Of My Own LabourTerminal AccessDipping the StacksReadingMusicRemember Kids: Reading the The Unix Time-Sharing System (1974) I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of the command line over the last couple of months. Mostly as a continuation of the inside-out thinking I started in Hard Worlds for Little Guys. What’s the difference between inhabiting a computer system, rather than just using one? What is the relationship between any given command, the thing issuing it, and the world in which that action then causes a consequence? So I’ve been going through a bunch of the ‘must-read’ computer science literature for the first time. Most recently, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson’s The UNIX Time-Sharing System, originally published in 1974. I’ve written up my obsidian notes. The paper is a technical account of the Unix operating…