The Hardest Thing: Building and Running the UNIX Kernel from Original Sources

Comments · 656

• MA

  @matt_b... · 1 year ago

  Oh man, I was the release engineer responsible for exactly one Solaris release at Sun Microsystems. Even when you know what you're doing, it's a chore. Can't wait to see how this unfolds!

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• ER

  @ericanderson2482 · 1 year ago

  Building UNIX for the first time for new hardware is challenging, but gets easier with practice.  I had the job building new UNIX kernels both Berkley and ATT versions on a variety of new hardware platforms.  I have great thanks to the academic computing center of St. Olaf College, which ran PDP 11/45 and then PDP 11/70 machines running UNIX for student use.  The majority of the staff of the computer center were students, and we had full view of the UNIX sources and were responsible for adding device drivers and making updates etc.  This experience put me well ahead in my career after graduation.  Glad to see your build was a success, and that you had fun.

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• JA

  @jamesdenning9893 · 1 year ago (edited)

  1976 I helped write the output spooler. UC OS class - Ken Thompson was the instructor...... (I'm really old)

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• TA

  @taberguld · 1 year ago

  This channel gives me much joy. Happy Christmas, everyone!

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• BD

  @bdietz2 · 1 year ago

  thank you for making this great video about working with BSD Unix on a PDP-11. I'm 75 years old and this reminds me of working with Honeywell's H716, which was a PDP 11 competitor with similar memory addressing constraints. Years later I did some custom X.25 driver work on Xenix 286 running on a PC/AT clone which had it's own 64 kb segment size memory limits. Now you can get documentation and great textbooks on Unix/BSD/Linux internals, but back in 1987 it was a real slow slog of compile, rebuild and test and then try another experiment -- very much like what you described. Keep up the great videos, and keep reminding newbies how important is was (and is) to understand how things work.

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• YE

  @yelowpunk · 1 year ago

  If youtube asks me later, I'm marking this video 'aspirational' 'educational' and 'feel-good'.

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• WH

  @whistl034 · 1 year ago

  Hi Dave! Whistl here, another IT old timer. Enjoyed the video, brought me right back. Started in mainframes in the 70s, became a UNIX Sysadmin in '86, when UNIX workstations were popular and multi-processor superminis were just becoming a thing. They liked our auto-parallelizing compiler software. Building UNIX was only a little better then, compared to  your PDP 11s. My first UNIX box ran (BSD-based) Dynix and was a Sequent Balance B8. A few years later I was maintaining 43 servers and workstations running 23 different flavors of UNIX. Ultrix, Dynix, Irix, AIX, Okix, Solaris, you name it, they had at least one, including the tiniest Intel Paragon supercomputer they ever made. Many of today's Linux admins have no idea how much things have improved.

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• TR

  @tronmcconnell4465 · 3 months ago

  I'm glad to hear that Clem was able to assist with this effort.  I'd like to think I too contributed, indirectly, as I was the TA for the Introduction to Digital Systems course required for all Sophomores in the EE Dept. at Carnegie Mellon University when Clem was working on his undergraduate degree there, giving Clem his first exposure to basic computer hardware.

• WE

  @westlydurkee6230 · 1 year ago

  This channel is a godsend. Thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge and experience and happy holidays.

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• JE

  @jeremycooper2127 · 1 year ago (edited)

  The foggy dispersion of the cataract simulation of the VT420 simulation at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBFeM-sa2YY&amp;t=85">01:25</a> floored me.

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• RO

  @rogerhuston8287 · 1 year ago

  My first real tech job was a configuration manager for Symantec in the 90&apos;s. It took us over 19 hours to compile WinNT from Microsoft, but their build system could only use 1 computer. &nbsp;At Symantec we developed a distributed system, compiling each library independly. &nbsp;Sure, linking would break, but the last computer going down the list would eventually link everything after it was properly compiled. &nbsp;Still, Norton Utilities would still take most of the night to compile using 3 to 5 computers and these were the biggest baddest 486 machines we could get. LOL

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• TO

  @ToallpointsWest · 11 months ago

  This video was waaaayyyy more fun that I thought it was going to be!! Takes me back!! Thank you!