VCF East 2019 -- Brian Kernighan interviews Ken Thompson

well thank you so my name is Evan and on the sucker who volunteer to run this thing thank you a lot of people give me credit but it's because of 40 50 60 volunteers year round that this happens I could do nothing alone I used to that's like when I did it alone I had hair so our hashtag throughout the weekend is VCF East please use it and that's our website because somebody advances slide please volunteer myself okay so how many of you knew a guy named Andrew Gandhi okay so danver Gandhi was one of our original members of our group like in 2005 last year he couldn't make it here because he was fighting the stage for cancer and unfortunately he did pass away his daughters are here I know he'd be very proud of that Dan used to design our old t-shirts all the old really awesome t-shirts if anybody has one because it Dan so we dedicated this your show to my friend Dan [Applause] special snakes - info age Science Center for hosting us hackaday our sponsor a few days ago hackaday tweeted us to 400,000 people ACM computer to us to 40,000 people Bell Labs tweeted us to 20,000 people and Ars Technica tweeted us to 1.1 million people what if they come when you all walked in you've got a little miniature program booklet one side is yesterday's scheduled so ignore that part but on the bottom of that there's a QR code for her show survey we need to know how we did we can use better next year and you can win a polo shirt or a VCF swag so please fill that out and you can give it a front desk I'll talk about some improvements in our Museum real fast we recently installed security cameras that's Martin last year our network consisted of a Raspberry Pi 4 server a Linksys home router and a consumer-grade little ups and now in a couple of $50 closeout discount tablets now we have a proper network minuteman donated a brand new rack now ups we have real servers and Cisco equipment and the whole nine yards so a real network now is a nice thing to have and access points on the ceilings and POV and everything else so it's pretty awesome and that's all thanks to your donations from the event it raises money as we can do things like this there is a computer called a VAX 9000 it is the computationally and physically largest computer deck ever built there were about three dozen ever made and we got the last one it was in service six months ago by an Air Force defense contractor in Colorado who won't tell us what they do with it our policy has been only accept the nation's we do not purchase artifacts they were happy to give it to us but we had to go get it from Colorado one member you know who you are gave us a five-figure check the higher traffic tell her to do it thank you sir and our plan is to restore it it doesn't just so we need a bigger space to put it on display and we need the capital fund we're just beginning over the next five years or so to raise a quarter million dollars to have a bigger building here on campus and again events like this enable that to happen my girlfriend Charlotte who was at the front desk you met we decided to make a big arrow pointing to our information kiosk it is not the blue rack or the IBM 1130 it is in the middle between them you can't see it well oh yeah that's the next slide that should even but anyway that is the information kiosk it picture doesn't do it justice it's a touch screen monitor and a little PC we want to have four or five or six of those throughout the museum again these things cost money so we have events we made the arrow the big arrow we did not intend for it to look like an amiga cursor but it does so that was a happy accident very happy accident there was a store in Manhattan called tekserve from about 1982 a few years ago they went out of business and they auctioned all their assets on eBay somebody in Los Angeles had a brother in New York who was an Apple fan as a joke the guy bid on the auction like a hundred bucks took a screen capture sent to his brother-in-law aha I've been to the sign two weeks later got an email you won the auction local pickup only in New York the guy's brother-in-law was like I don't want it my wife believed me so the guy in LA he spent like called the Museum of Natural History to Smithsonian no one gave at a time of day 20 calls later someone told about someone talks only talk about us and he said please step aside that was a few years ago one of the new things this year next to the consignment room we have a software store and we hung the sign up in a software store and thanks to Tony and Jason we paired it up I was reading an article in the local newspaper a few weeks ago about an abandoned local shopping mall I was just bored scroll through the pictures inside the mall and saw a RadioShack store of the sign and the article said who in a management company was so you know what I did and this summer we're getting the RadioShack store sign if anybody wants to donate an artifact or donate funds or volunteer or just take part or otherwise learn about us please call me email me anytime so highlights is here we have two exhibit halls historically people only find a first exhibit hall don't go down a ramp to the second one what's funny is we get rave reviews of people who saw they think this on a whole show they rave about it do you know there was a whole second bigger exhibit hall so please heat both exhibit halls the second exhibit hall we have a special exhibit called UNIX town and a special Atari exhibit this year with like 1415 exhibits all Atari Munich's because tomorrow is Joe de Cure from Atari and Amiga and you know a few years ago when we had Brian here as a speaker it was a room like this totally filled out was a tent actually and the next day Bob Frank stood from visicalc had to fill his shoes and I said then I'll send now I feel sorry for Joe to cure tomorrow from Atari because he can't possibly buy your shoes can we have a vendor room by the front miner front lobby we have a huge consignment thing down the hall here the software store we have glitch works Workshop single board computers learn to solder workshop our museum will be open the rest of the museum so if you open as well down the street the satellite dish and food omnomnom all this stuff has to be staffed by our volunteers so after this speech let them do their job give them 10 15 minutes to open everything up so the exhibitors can get to their exhibits before you guys do but you didn't come to hear me so a man is anyone not know who ken Thompson is okay okay good without any further delay mr. ken Thompson co-inventor of Unix [Applause] and and and brian kirk and brian kernighan the kak in our okay so somebody turns that thing off or stands in front of it maybe want to move out of the doors and it's in front of the projector that would do it great okay yeah and I'm going to sit as well so that I don't fall off the stage so what we're gonna do today is a fireside chat and I suppose somebody could put out a little you know you'll lager or something like that better okay yeah we don't need that um so Kenan I we're at Bell Labs together a very very long time ago he arrived at their lives in the mid-60s I'll let him say more about that and I arrived as a summer intern in 67 and fortunately this is one of these you know boy talk about being in the right place the right time by blind luck I was in the same group as Ken my office was directly across the hall from his for about 30 years we retired essentially the same day in 2000 then went separate ways but we've kept in touch it over all that time and actually this week I think is the first time that I have seen him physically since we left Bell Labs he hasn't changed so so it's actually been fun on Tuesday he gave a guest appearance in my class at Princeton with a group that was much smaller than this and substantially younger but maybe not even dressed in the same kinds of t-shirts anyway we had a great time with that as at the fireside chat idea and so basically what we're gonna do is the same thing here I will ask Ken some leading questions let him do all the talking and then partway through we will encourage the audience to ask questions as well okay so that's where we're going and to do that pull up my little set of notes one piece of paper two small print yes yes okay something that Evan didn't mention by the way is that Ken obviously created the UNIX operating system with Dennis Ritchie a system that we all know and love and have used for a very very long time he's been recognized for that with all kinds of awards and I will not embarrass him by going through too many of them but it includes things like the ACM Turing award in 1983 in the National Medal of Technology and the Japan prize he's a member at the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences and the reason that he's on the East Coast normally he's in California the reason he's on the East Coast is that on Thursday he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame so let me at this point stop talking and Ken why don't you tell us a little bit about early life and in particular how you got to bell labs oh I was in school in Berkeley and I was I don't know if the term still applies but I was a professional student right I just I just drifted along I've you know rolled in class I got a lectric ingeniero agree but it was easy because I was an electrical hobbyist for essentially ten years before that and but I consumed computers you know I loved them you know and and at that time there was no computer science curriculum that at Berkeley so it was being invented and there was a big political fight between electrical engineering and math to decide who gets this new realm now and the fight although they didn't know it was whether it was going to be mathematically computer science or computer computer science and computer people won so I was I was drifting along this summer after I graduated and that was a surprise because I didn't know that I'd gotten all the requirements I I was just going to stay in the in the university because I owned it I don't know how to describe this but my fingers were in absolutely everything I had well they come the main monster computer at the University shut down at midnight and I'd come in with my key and I don't know and I'd be my personal computer for that till 8 a.m. so that's the kind of thing so I was happy I wasn't you know no ambition describing extreme work I mean I was a workaholic but for no goal there was no goal out there for what I was doing and a teacher who happened to be a one time a one year teacher from Bell Labs came out taught a real computer course which I took audited and after that in the and the next summer I didn't apply for graduate school to be honest I didn't think I was good enough and right towards the end of the summer my this friend me now friend gave me a class schedule says here's your classes for grad school he had applied and I got accepted and I think it was with his recommendation but I'm not positive and an enrolled and that's how I got into grad school then during that year there's big recruiting towards the end of that year where all the companies come out and try to do this and I didn't recruit I didn't go to any of these they had booths lined up in the gym you know one after the other and I kept getting schedules be it be at the Bell Labs booth on you know such-and-such a time and it just went over my head I wasn't until finally the whole week had gone by and I'd skipped maybe six or eight recruit attempts by Bell Labs again you know no no ambition the Bell Labs recruiter came and knocked on my door at home I invited him in and his story is I don't remember it but his story is that I gave him ginger snaps and beer for pro and we talked and we talked and we talked and then he left so that was my recruiting for for Bell Labs then I got a request to come out for an interview to the East Coast to New Jersey and I told him no and they said well why not I said well I'm not interested in a job commercial in a commercial institution and I just be taking your money I don't feel right about taking your money to go out there and I says we'll take it visit us come and look I said well I could I have friends on the East Coast from from high school days and I could come out and and interview you know they wanted two days of interview and I said no only one and and then I'll get in and I'll Drive down the East Coast and visit all my friends and they said okay okay and I said but be warned I mean the answer's no I don't want a job so I went out there and the very first thing I did was walk down the corridor of the first place I I went which was research computer science research at Bell Laboratories and every name on the doors on the way down I knew you know and it was it was just shocking and then I was interviewed by two amazing people one of them is a big co-author with Brian chin Lynn they did traveling salesman heuristic programming and so I got then I got in my rental car after the day and I drove down the East Coast and that and somehow they tracked me and there was a there was there was a offer waiting it like the third stop now news and I picked up the offer and drove it from one stop to another which was maybe two hours thinking about it and then when I got to the next friend's house I called him and said okay so that's that's Bella laps 35 years yeah I chose it back in the little good old days some people really knew what they were doing not Ken but [Applause] so once you've got to Bell Labs obviously there was a work on a variety of things one of which was multics and out of that experience came unix do you want to talk some about that sort of evolution how you got started into that well multix I I don't know if anybody well you studied our archaeology like was a monster Lee over engineered over big big project and it's a typical second system syndrome where they had a very nice time sharing system at MIT and they decided they were gonna do the next one better that's kiss a death and so they they cooperated in a three-way thing with with MIT Bell Labs and General Electric General Electric provided the machine it couldn't run on a normal machine it had to have its own machine monster and then programming was done at Bell Labs and but it was mostly designed at MIT and so we got these things you know do this to this to this and we did them and mostly I was uninspired I I do it and it was good good work I mean you know I was I was a pretty good programmer I just I just didn't know what I was you know it was a notch in a big wheel and and I and it was producing something that I didn't know I didn't want to use myself at some point management realize this Philips management and they backed out of the project so it now became just not General Electric who was the follow-on Honeywell Honeywell Honeywell and MIT and Bell Labs backed out but they backed out with a nasty taste in their mouth you know we don't do operating systems know you know and here I was I wanted to do operating system so I I actually found a it was called a workstation its pb-7 there was a remote job entry for electrical engineering circuits you draw a circuit on a CRT tube and you push a button the circuit goes into the main computer by way of data sets kind of you know telephone lines and they do the crunching and they come back and then you you can get the transfer function of various sorts on the onion on the screen all electrical engineering I just took it over and made some games on it there was a one of the nice things about this is it had a monster head of this Horrible's you know kind of round scope like old TV you know about this big around but it had a hood that went like this and bifurcated your your eyes and so I built a little shoot-'em-up space thing where you two guys out there in a very large space and when you find each other you start shooting at each other and and if you get on their tail they can't get rid of you so you're gonna win if you can actually maneuver to get on their tail but as you get on their tail you see all their their fire coming out around you it's it's pretty it was fun and but you had to have a partner so that's what I used the telephone sets for there were probably ten of these remote job entry stations around and I arranged to have mall loaded with my program and somebody just wander over look in and and and choose you know you know any one of the common authorities to find out who you're gonna fight and so you're sitting there and you don't know who you're fighting and you're just so I'm sorry I'm yeah press on no I not even her gait story the next thing was a I was interested in a disk this pdp-7 had a disk no other PT b7 had one like this it was six feet tall and a single platter and the platter was on the vertical around and and there was kind of a folk Lord you know you don't stand in front of and you know standing back of it because of it if it lets go it would be like a propeller on an airplane going through and it was fast it was too fast for the machine which was you know kind of a shame it couldn't make good use of it but I I wrote a disc edge ruling algorithm to try to maximize throughput on on potentially any disc but in particular this disc got it going but then I had to taste to test it I had I had to load it up with work I mean you don't you don't you know you know you don't say read you get something back that's any disk can do that so I had to you know loaded up get it get it really you know test its throughput under different algorithms and things and for that I needed I needed some programs on the side to do that and so I started writing these programs on the side and at some point I realized without knowing it up until that point that I was three weeks from an operating system with three programs one a week an editor I needed an editor to write code I need an assembler to turn the code into language I could run and I needed a little kernel kind of overlay call it an operating system and luckily right at that moment my wife went on a three-week vacation to take my my one-year-old roughly to visit my in-laws who were in California disappeared all alone and one week one week one week and we had eunuchs yeah I think programmers aren't quite as productive these days so from that pdp-7 things went on somewhere you enlisted Dennis or he enlisted you do you want to say more about how that II fall Oh when UNIX was running it was by far even though it was a crummy little you know factor of ten slower computer than they op you know the comm center I started picking up really impressive users on this machine it had two stations it had the I put a scribble text on this scope that was one station and then I had a model 33 teletype on the other one that's that's the the so two at a time were you in the seven I don't know I have a single-digit user ID on one of those systems yeah then this was a user McLeroy was a user Morris was a user I think I was about it maybe that was that was on that was the order of the user community on this single machine the Bell Labs still had a nasty taste in its mouth from it's horrible you know operating some no more operating systems so we made a proposal to get a P to be 10 which was like the time sharing computer of the day to port UNIX onto you know this this this operating system which which every everybody meaning the four of us liked and it was soundly rejected when it fit into the typical budget of somebody busting something usually a single person at Bell Labs could consume roughly they're loaded salary in a year on the side so the notion was that somebody's salary they're loaded salary that included the building in the guards and the things they're loaded salary twice over was kind of the budget for Bell Labs and so yeah you know you get four people together you can get multi-million things about five people so we were well within budget yeah we asked for this PBT no one said no we don't do operating systems we don't do it so one of our fellows Joe came up with a I'm trying to use a better word lie where they were going the Patent Office was going to buy a special-purpose editing complex to edit store and modify patents they have their own formatting requirements they have their own numbering they that they're unique no normal editing thing so so some company was going to try to I was selling some some computers you know for patent applications and we said a-ha we can do that and we'll save all this money so so the second proposal was to save money rather than to spend it and and for a machine that wasn't on no operating system honest [Laughter] and it was for somebody else it was all you know a you know it's a three-way win it was impossible to say no so we got it and instantly reported you next Twitter and then Joe asana believed this which was I don't know why he did but he wrote in Roffe and tear off with enough macro power to do the patent and then at some point then we were actually doing patents during the day we'd have of 10 patent secretaries I guess dirty word now on typing in patents patents patents and and and we'd print them in but we do our own work at night but we wouldn't do anything serious because this was an unpredicted machine and would crash if you do anything remotely malicious like you know writing machine language and then the Patent Office took our machine they loved it and bought us with the help of an adjacent still we we couldn't be in operating systems bought it with with the adjacent McMahon computer stuff max oh yeah the acoustics people who stinky right they they actually footed the bill and said here you know because pill labs was a special place it had so much money you couldn't you couldn't it there was a tax on every phone in the whole country and 1% of that went to the Bell Labs I mean it's so it was a I think this is your word it wasn't a budget it was a quota yeah yes so a license to spend money in some sense but for the good of everybody so we got now the first one was a pdp-11 I don't know if any of you have a seen a pdp-11 with a slash 20 on it note slash twenty pdp-11 okay they were very few have made we got it before the peripherals came and Morris wrote DC I think it was the very first program ever written on the pdp-11 and it was while it was still a paper tape operating system because the disc hadn't come and and we were doing some porting and writing an assembler that we could live with for that machine and some other things in preparation and testing it with the assembly language for DC and then when it came it almost came up UNIX almost instantly when like the disk and communications tell a teletype remote teletype communications gear came in which dick was feverishly trying to build in real time so it was not very this would probably be roughly what 71 70 71 that yeah yes 70 yeah so it wasn't very long after that that the I think in some sense the most obvious new contribution of UNIX came along which the invention of pipes do you want to say something about pipes oh yeah the pb-7 actually had a little thing called IPC and inner inner something-something Connect communication and you could stuff something in and pull something out it wasn't cute it was just as something but it both processes that did this had to communicate and we experimented with it for doing some things but basically it was a worthless interface and was never known or described or used on the pdp-7 I did that because my immediate supervisor department head is the name of the title yeah wrote a paper that has come around the internet it's on it's online saying wouldn't it be great to kind of connect programs up like in a mission uh you know and I thought about that seriously and decided that I just couldn't make it work because of queues would explode or queues would draw if you just kind of let everything just you know read and write these random mesh kind of Anarchy and you know connection of processes also I didn't think of any real program except mesh like programs today whether you know these kind of thing where it would be any good would be worthwhile so I put it off I put this IPC in the 7 so that it was possible to actually do that if you want it if they were all cooperating it was never done nobody it was just you know it was the wrong idea and one day I got this idea and and pipes you know it essentially exactly as they are today and I put them in the operating system in an hour they're trivial they really are super trivial when you've got redirecting IO like UNIX already had and wrote a shell and I tried it out on a couple of things and and the idea that was it was just mind blowing dust that that Dennis and I came in and rewrote everything in the world our world in one night we converted everything in the moat but mostly what we did is throw out extraneous messages that like sort would never say hey I'm sorting you know I'm merging I'm doing this I'm working on this file like you know all that garbage is gone you know sort would read sort then right and suddenly sort was what we call the filter in though in that day and then we converted Phil ever filled everything that that processed something we converted into filters it was massive and and just exciting and my favorite thing was DC again desk calculator we wrote a program that would take numbers and convert them into words you know 500 would turn into 5000 right and and so you could connect up DC to numbers this work thing called numbers and then we had a speech synthesized and they connect that to the speech synthesis and you'd go one two you type 1 2 plus and I would say 4 was never good at man and and those kind of things just came spontaneously you know just you know interconnections of things that were never meant to be in the same room together okay so anyway that would though that was a frenzy it was almost like a like these fish eating the cow South American fish piranhas yeah no I remember that it really was frenzy the right where it was like wow look at all these things you can do and and the world changed essentially overnight at that point um it's like I've got a bunch of other things here I wonder but do you want to talk about some of the other things that you have done over the years that are in and around this for example a program that I was telling the class the other day they've been using we all of us have been using since probably about 1971 or 72 so it's much older than my students it's not older than some of you but it's older than many of you this program called crap remember crap I wrote wrote regret almost as it is right and had it at some point I decided that I shouldn't be the pusher of the bin directory I you know that if there was a consensus or if there was a need or something and something I might have written what would go into but but things I wrote would go into my directory you know and and I I I didn't want to be the I don't know what's the word but they've all a dictator for life yes yes yes for the heroin addict you know the pusher not the head of the edit so I had grip squirreled away and I'd use it for everything and and again Doug McIlroy my department head came in and said you know it would be really great if we could look for things in files and and and do this nice well let me think I'll think about it overnight so the overnight think was basically getting rid of bugs and things that I'd meant to do that I hadn't done and you know an hour work maybe at most and next day I presented him with grep and he was exactly what I wanted it's a move from my directory into the bin directory and became a noun and a verb and is is Minh X version of the OED had it in is a real word but the hardest part was naming it and it wasn't called grip when it was mine and I think was called s for search something you know something something in my my vocabulary and so anyway grep came up when I decided what it was really what it was yeah there was there was for awhile a bumper sticker and a slogan that AT&T put a called reach out and grab someone to be remembered and I at the time our vice president of research was Arno Penzias you know winner of Nobel Prize for finding the background for identifying a background radiation oh and somebody said that he could use this in a talk you know reach out and grab someone but he wanted to be sort of sure what that meant and so he asked me you know is this okay and what does it mean and so I got to explain it to him um other things that you've been involved with for a long time include languages there were the very early languages like B unbond and even before that and all the way through now to your work with go with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer you want to talk about languages and evolution and sure I'll try early history again my department head McIlroy keeps coming up he's the he's the smartest of all of us and East's remembered or written down of all of us had a friend Robert McClure who had a language called team G and McClure got very defensive what's the word commercial about his language and wouldn't let it out and when he left the labs he took it with him and say you can't you know proprietary he can't touch it so it was a compiler compiler a yak like thing but it was not a symbol at a time it was matching it was doing a recursive descent if you know the terminology he McIlroy sat there and wrote on a piece of paper now not on a computer TMG written in TMG okay complete he just did it right and it was beautiful handwriting it was no scratches I mean it was trans mugger fire and and then he now has TMG written and TMG he decided to give this piece of paper to his piece of paper and write down what came out the code which he did and then he came over to my editor and he typed in his code assembled it and I won't say without error but with so few errors you'd be stunning he came up with a TMG compiler on the PDB seven written in TMG and it's the most basic bare impressive self compilation I've ever seen in my life alright so anyway it was there it appeared it was a tool early very early tool on the PDB seven I decided no computer is complete without Fortran it's got to have Fortran nobody will ever buy a computer without a Fortran not now the the P to be seven was 8k of 18 bit words I think yeah and I ripped off 4k for the system right I that was mine and and then the users swapped through the other 4k and so I was writing Fortran in TMG I was having a great time and then the first time I tried to actually do it it was like 10 times the size of the the thing over there so I started cutting pieces out of it you know like you know down and down and down and down and down when it finally got down to 4k I called it B and and but it was right at 4k because it came from above right there's no reason to stop when you get to where you want so then I put features in that I liked and it would blow over 4k and not run so I wrote a separate version of B which was a virtual B that would run the program out of disk and so it would grow over 4k I'd run it on virtual be to get the B source the B source for both of them were the same and hopefully what I wrote was a compaction of some sort so it would get smaller so to go under 4k so I could bring it back to being roughly real-time kind of you know and this one over and over and over until the final version of be there was one other added thing to be which was I saw Johnson's semi colon version of the for loop and I put that in I stole it and and and and and that went virtual and then came back down again and then Dennis took it and wanted to put it on the comm center at the big comm center and he wrote a compiler for B for the big Khamsin ER and he called it newbie and in B in B and it was used to some extent and it was externally ported to several universities and then he decided that wasn't enough at this point time had gone on and we now had a PDP 11 and we started getting more memory for the pdp-11 so we could think about expansion and we decided that we had to write UNIX in a higher-level language it was just mandatory this was all assembly language and all that so he started muting new B into C with the the the big deal was types he put types in though and B being being the old old C were very very similar language except with all the types new be only had words you load/store add everything was words and the pdp-11 was bytes so something had to be done to not waste factor for on it on it so anyway long story short all by himself he converted that made C I then tried to rewrite the kernel and see that you know whatever this current language was which was called C and failed three times three total complete failures and I basically being an egotist I blamed it on the language so so he'd go back and beef up the language for something and then finally when stretchers came in the way that structures did come into the language which is completely outside of Beebe had nothing resembling structures the port to eunuchs of see on the pdp-11 worked you know it was before that it was too complicated I just couldn't keep it all together and so then there was the first C version of UNIX and and C became a pretty you had something to do with C didn't you know I'm nothing to do is see I twisted the guy's arm into writing a book but that's the extent of my dog okay shifting gears a bit you started life as a or some part of it as an electrical engineer you've been involved in a lot of different Hardware things perhaps the most interesting piece of hardware that you were deeply involved with was just playing stuff you want to talk about chess oh yes I've always been interested in chess I played it when I was like in the seventh grade because that's when Bobby Fischer was right at this hot height when I was in seventh Bobby Fischer I are like 10 days apart in age except that he's dead but so I I would I would come home and on the cover of Life magazine and be Bobby Fischer and Here I am exactly the same age and I'm a seventh grader you know what what do I do and so I felt very very you know I don't know worthless and I joined the Chess Club and play chess in school and was good at it but I didn't like it I didn't like to either win because you know you you know you feel sorry for you know somebody who would take it seriously most of them really do and I didn't like to lose of course and that cut down on my options you know so but but I got hooked on chess and I was a chess spectator as a spectator sport now know very few people do this but like now on the internet you can get all the tournaments in real time and watch him and I do you know I get up at 4:00 in the morning to watch something happening in Belarus you know and it's great all that is anyway back to chess so I decided I was gonna write a chess machine not a chess chess program and I did and the annual ACM tournaments an ACM conventions had a chess tournament sideline and I went to the first one in 1972 with a C program that played chess and I believe but I'm not positive that it was the very first C program that got out of Bell Labs in some sense and I went to play against all these um bells and Cray's and you know and got my head handed to me and and came to the conclusion that speed was what matters yeah no matter if I had an algorithm and you had an algorithm and you went twice as fast as me you could emulate what I was doing and set traps you know I mean it's just it's just it's just normal sense so I went back and built a little tiny chess machine well actually I built the first one was a one board chess machine that plugged into a pdp-11 and the pdp-11 did all the work and played with that for a while got ideas where it was slow where it was fast it was almost the same speed as the software because the interface was so clumsy so then I built a micro coated machine on the side which was now in a box about this square it was significantly faster and I took it to a 78 ACM tournament and won it it was shocking and but then the 79 tournament I tied or something like that basically I didn't come in I came in like college second maybe tied for second third and I so I went back licked my wounds and then I ran into Joe Condon I massively competent designed electric engineering design thing and he built a bunch of he and some other people design design tools for building hardware that would take diagrams on screens convert them into things simulate the things produce wires minimize the wires and then the last step was that we modified a an XY plotter and you would mount a wire wrap board underneath the XY plotter with the pins sticking up towards and the plotter instead of an ink pen had a not just a you know just a site or a site or and you'd have a wire wrap gun in your hand and a bunch of wires and it would come and say it would go to position itself the XY plotter would position itself over one of the pins and you'd take out a wire and and zap it on and then it would go to where it was supposed to go and you go over there and SAP it on and you do this for eight hours and you had a chess machine and and I took that chess machine and now this this one was serious I mean this was really serious and it was about this tall from not the floor but from my floor and about this square and it had again it was run by a PT b11 but it had 16 17 very large wire wrap boards they were about this big and I don't know and I went often it just trounced everybody and again speed kills you know it really does it was the world championship champion and 80 and then the US Champion the US would was the 8th the name for the tournament that the ACM held every year that it was the US champion from roughly 80 til 86 or 87 until the craze started coming out infamously by the way infamously the does everybody know the Moscow trip of chess tell him it's a good story okay so I was invited after I won the World Championship in 80 I was invited by Botvinnik if you know who that is a very famous chess player in the Soviet Union to come out and mainly I heard from my friends underground is they didn't believe that a chess program could be a master it was a hoax and they wanted to test it so they invited me out to Moscow to give a set of demos and the demos were in fact were a test they had ranges of strengths of people they were gonna put in tournaments with me and play and I was happy to do it you know so I packages up and I wanted to be on the plane that I was on out of Kennedy and Kennedy has a freight terminal and they said if you wanted to be on the plane you're on you have to come out and bring it out the day before so I got in my car drove all the way out to Kennedy gave him this this computer with a whole bunch of words on it to make sure that it got to where I wanted it to go and legally Bell Labs had made a car name for it you know they would export import-export you know kind of thing a lot of paperwork a lot of you know and I packed a suitcase full of spare parts so if anything broken this thing I could just fix it right and left it at the freight terminal next day I go out to the passenger terminal get on my plane land and the big contingent of very special people meet me and they go out and they empty the plane and it's not there and I say well you know I tried I really tried and they so they make all sorts of inquiries and it's gonna be here tomorrow so big contingent goes out the next day it's not there and this goes on and on now in the background we were well known I was well known by the head of security of Bell Labs for various kind of as a real quick side thing I had a license to kill I don't know if you knew this is in Vic's file folder saying if you're caught in a funny place don't worry you know he's and and Vic had me tried to break into various things and if I got caught I was a get-out-of-jail-free card so as a as a kind of hands-on security expert so anyway I was known but by the security the head of Security's name was crude and crude had somebody who worked for him used to who quit her left and was a guard at at the Kennedy transportation site five minutes keep going then we'll haul him off the stage the and they said that it's out there and it's got this police yellow tape wrapped around it saying don't don't touch it hadn't it had a telephone number on it period that was it so through this and coming back to crew and then going up through Bell Labs they tried to look at it and they find it and no one would touch it where it was because all this tape and you call the phone number and they say who do you want and you say you know if you don't I say a password or something whatever you're supposed to say they hang up on you and that would that was it there was nothing else so this my trip was aborted it was it got more and more I mean they were pissed off him really seriously pissed off it and so I left basically proving that it was all a hoax and came back and and now bill what bail was the name of the computer of the program all the programs actually was a member of the local chess club and I would go to the local chess club with it for several purposes one to get a an idea of rating of how good it was and two to calm the people down because you can pick up 200 points but just playing somebody who's never played a computer before it was frightening you know they think you know it's a monster it's a computer can kill you you know that kind of stuff but I would give simultaneous exhibitions and everything so anyway it was a a very familiar very popular member of the local chess club I take it every week Friday nights I take it's right I came up one Friday night alone because I didn't have a computer and they they all asked what was going on where is it can I play it this kind of stuff so I gave a story I gave the story up to that point and the next week I came back to it again alone to the Chess Club and somebody who was a member of the Chess Club worked for a throw away newspaper in Long Island the one of these Sunday things you find you know freebie on your on your lawn and he said that he told his editor about it his editor wanted write a story would it be okay and I said sure so we sat and we talked and then not the next Sunday but the Sunday after that it came out on this Long Island newspaper and two days later the Washington Post got it and called me up and I told the whole story to him and he says access and we're you know we've got everybody looking for this thing we can't find out who wants it what they want what's it all about and and he says just a second I'll try to find I'll check on it nice right good you know ten minutes later he called me up he found the guy he found what they want he found what it was all about and what had happened is the day before I took my computer down to the terminal regen that tells you when this happened had made an announcement where he used the term hemorrhage of technology how the United States is just giving away everything and and and I had very carefully written all over this thing computer Moscow and man it was snatched up not not ten seconds later so and and they wanted to get out of it is unembarrassed in me as they could because it was a PR story that was now in the post and so the post wrote a story on it it was it was a very good story and the next day everybody called you know Scientific American science Popular Mechanics what's what's what a Sports Illustrated and every newspaper you know at some point they put people on to answer these questions and and then the day after that all these things started coming out and I got a call after the day after that from somebody saying well we have your computer they called me we have your computer we'd like to give it back and I said okay well you know you know where I am and and they said but you don't understand it was technically illegal and we can't just ignore that we're gonna have to find you and I said okay how much and they say the fine is ten percent of the price of the thing you're you're illegally exporting and they said so how much is it and I said well for the budget for building it the parts it's one-of-a-kind so it's hard to put a price on it the parts were seventeen thousand dollars and they any thought for saying says you don't seem to understand we're gonna charge you ten percent of that price surely it was used right I mean you know anyway he talked himself down to a couple hundred dollars and and Bell Labs paid the fine and it showed up in the lobby they delivered it to the lobby the next day Evan what should we do on time [Applause] we have good careers depend on you Nixon [Applause] c-can I ask you to raise those same hands please thank you receiving lines please be brief with your time don't hog the man everyone else watch him - we're gonna take them down to the eunuchs exhibit at some point you want to grab selfies but respect this pipe what else [Music] have you seen

Channel: Vintage Computer Federation

Views: 188,446

Keywords: Brian Kernighan, UNIX, K&R, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Bell Labs, Vintage Computer Festival, Vintage Computer Federation, VCF East, InfoAge Science Center

Id: EY6q5dv_B-o

Length: 63min 51sec (3831 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/pendo324]

Interview starts around 7:40

[u/[deleted]]

Really fun to watch, made me very nostalgic.

[u/PrestigiousInterest9]

Great interview

[u/bmf___]

Does anyone know the paper that he mentions https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o?t=1895 ? I would really like to give it a read.