F/OSS Comics #13: BSD Unix, Part 3 – The Beginning of BSD Unix

kps · 2026-11-02 17:34

https://fosscomics.com/posts/12.%20BSD%20Unix%20Part%202%20-%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20vi%20Editor/#comic-panel-visual-mode — “Coding's a lot more fun in visual mode.”

Coding in visual mode would be no fun at all on a Tek 4014¹. It's a storage tube and can't modify text on screen.

Should have drawn an ADM-3A².

¹ https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/4014

² https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:Lear_Siegler_ADM-3A-2.jpg

JdeBP · 2026-11-02 09:13

Marshall Kirk McKusick, mentioned in this comic, was still committing changes to FreeBSD as of last August:

* https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/sbin/restore?id=2cefae4cf34e7d39fc3b27358d7d66a96b3b0056

drewg123 · 2026-11-02 14:55

He regularly attends BSD conferences like BSDCan and EuroBSD. He's one of the nicest guys I've ever met. Its always nice when you meet your heroes and they are amazing people.

pengaru · 2026-11-02 17:12

If you're a McKusick fan, there's a series of recordings from his classroom lectures about operating systems. I saw some on VHS ages ago in a group setting. They were quite amusing from what I recall, for such an otherwise dry subject.

kleiba2 · 2026-11-02 13:58

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Kirk_McKusick

topaz_moose4 · 2026-11-02 08:20

Looks nice. It doesn't seem to have an RSS/Atom feed, though, and without one I'll probably lose track of the series.

benrutter · 2026-11-02 10:35

Ah, that's a shame! I was about to look for the RSS feed too - especially since the cross-over of people who'd be into this comic series and rss/atom is probably pretty large.

pbronez · 2026-11-02 14:15

Sent a PR for this. Vibecoded, we'll see if the author finds that helpful or insulting...

https://github.com/joone/fossbook/pull/8

getfacl · 2026-11-02 12:18

One of these days I need to write up my non-mythology version of the BSD story and dispel some of the popular retcons.

meekins · 2026-11-02 17:35

Mind sharing some dispel magic here?

happosai · 2026-11-02 13:25

A lot of people in fediverse would enjoy these. Consider creating an account on techub.social or any of the other tech/foss oriented mastodon instances.

lioeters · 2026-11-02 07:06

Love this. The human touch of illustration, and classic stories from computer history. I'm going through the entire series up to now, it's great.

My favorite panel so far: What is a real programmer? https://fosscomics.com/posts/6.%20The%20Origin%20of%20the%20Hacker%20Culture/images/real_en.webp

mixmastamyk · 2026-11-02 06:16

Neat. Found an issue in chapter 3, first sentence says electronic computers were during WWII, but they were electro-mechanical… they used relays. Vac tubes came later, ENIAC was finished after the war finished, for example.

rjsw · 2026-11-02 07:50

Colossus used valves.

defrost · 2026-11-02 08:06

They're likely thinking of Zuse's Z3 of 1938 rather than the somewhat later Max Newman / Tommy Flowers build of 1941-1943.

lproven · 2026-11-02 12:50

It's cute, but why is it a comic? The comic adds nothing to the narrative. It's a tweet-length text history with illustrations, not a comic in the sense of comic strip as medium.

serene_toucan2 · 2026-11-02 13:01

The site is fosscomics.com, so every post there is a comic. The author chose the medium because they wanted to make comics. Most documentaries could also be blog posts you read in 10-15 minutes, and that medium persists anyway.

Gud · 2026-11-02 10:00

Bill Joy, the unsung hero of the computer revolution.

jolmg · 2026-11-02 03:09

> bundling the Pascal system with ex, a line editor developed from em.

What's em? I thought it was developed from ed.

nagaiaida · 2026-11-02 03:12

https://www.coulouris.net/cs_history/em_story/

topaz_heron89 · 2026-11-02 05:09

> By the way, 'em' stands for 'editor for mortals' - I christened it that after Ken Thompson visited our lab at QMC while I was developing it and said something like: "yeah, I've seen editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them, I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing".

I find it hard to understand Thompson's view here. Not wanting to see the state of the file while editing seems like a strange preference to me.

tosti · 2026-11-02 05:19

To be fair, I sometimes edit files with ed. Especially the ones I've seen hundreds of times (eg /etc/ssh/sshd_config).

Nowadays we're dealing with orders of magnitude more code. Back in the day it would've been fine for the programs you wrote yourself.

topaz_heron89 · 2026-11-02 07:10

>Back in the day it would've been fine for the programs you wrote yourself.

Maybe, if your code was simple enough that you could keep the entire state in your head at once. But we're talking about people writing memory management routines and OS kernels, in C, with no LSP, no syntax highlighting, no linting, etc.

It's one thing to say "my hardware is too limited, I can't fit all that extra context into memory." But with that tech stack, I think choosing not to see the code around the line you're editing is a real handicap, no matter how experienced the programmer is.

tcnevin · 2026-11-02 12:28

I like this. Not sure if it matters too much but reverse order made me pause.

BikiniPrince · 2026-11-02 03:35

It absolutely needs like 52 panels. I hope they integrate some politics by panel 1025.

analog8374 · 2026-11-02 16:25

Good comic. Good drawing etc.

BiscuitEater546 · 2026-11-02 09:29

Good I like it