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PDP-7 Unix was the first Unix. It wasn't written in C.


"In 1969, Ken Thompson wrote the first UNIX system in assembly language on a PDP-7..." [1]

Half a century ago this living legend wrote an operating system. Can you imagine how much experience this single person holds today? It must be hard for him not to roll his eyes when talking to juniors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7


Writing an operating system is not all that hard–thousands of undergraduates do so yearly. What's hard is coming up with UNIX and implementing it as something that others can use.


Following a tutorial with thousands of Github repos to look at from the comfort of you favorite operating system isn't even remotely comparable to writing Unix in 1969.


Well, to be honest ITS and Multics were really usable.


Those undergraduates do so with development tools that had hundreds of thousands of man-hours invested into them. We can't pretend like this doesn't make their job any easier.




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