Annotated Unix Magic Poster(unixmagic.net)
213 pointsby kaycebasques12 days ago11 comments
  • schoen12 days ago
    I think the spool with usr written on it most likely refers to the /usr/spool directory, where user mailboxes (and I think print jobs) were traditionally kept.
  • ozbonus12 days ago
    There are two more paintings in this series: Unix Views and Unix Feuds. High quality scans of all three are available on the internet archive.
  • badc0ffee12 days ago
    Somehow I had never heard of/seen this before. It looks like a prog rock album cover or something.

    Some old commands in there I haven't used in a long time (poke, uucp), or never used - I think the troff I know is actually the one in GWBASIC (tracing off).

    • jibal12 days ago
      Much of the acceptance of UNIX at Bell Labs was due to its role as a typesetting system, with troff, eqn, and tbl commands. I worked for a UNIX support company (Interactive Systems Corporation) and our first customer was the U.S. Supreme Court because they deal with so many documents.
      • PopAlongKid12 days ago
        When I first started using Unix in school in the early 1980s, at least a third of the time was using nroff/troff, tbl and eqn. Maybe another 20% playing rogue. The rest was used to become a vi/ex advanced user, writing csh and awk scripts, and learning C.

        The article mentions the "t" in troff, but doesn't mention that "roff" was short for "run off". I forget what the "n" was for.

    • DonHopkins12 days ago
      The TRS-80 has TROFF and TRON!

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQoL_qpYbW0

      More useful but not quite as magical as DECSYSTEM 10 and DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC's "LISTREVERSE" command!

      https://web.archive.org/web/20210713130832/https://imgur.com...

      Chalk one up for DEC and BASIC. What other programming languages support that feature, huh?

      Now all you need is a COMEFROM and COMESUB and RUNREVERSE (or NUR) statements, and you can write reversible BASIC programs!

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

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Clock_World

          DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC User's Guide: LISTREVERSE command

    LISTREVERSE
    LISTNHREVERSE

    LISTREVERSE and LISTNHREVERSE print the contents of the
    user's memory area in order of descending line numbers. 
    LISTREVERSE precedes the output with a heading,
    LISTNHREVERSE eliminates the heading.

    LISTREVERSE

    EQUIV             10:53                      13-NOV-75

    40    END
    35    PRINT "THE EQUIVALENT CURRENT IS",I, " AMPERES"
    25    I=E1/R
    10    INPUT R
    5     INPUT E1

    READY
      http://bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-1...

      http://bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-2...

      Emacs should have an edit-reverse-mode!

      • Gibbon112 days ago
        I liked Rocky Mountain BASIC with it's nice string operations and first class matrix operations.

        I think it had a sort function too. But can't remember.

  • liendolucas12 days ago
    I would happily pay for a high quality print, but no idea where to get one from.
    • jiveturkey12 days ago
      https://jpmens.net/2021/04/09/the-unix-magic-poster/
      • liendolucas12 days ago
        Awesome, that looks like what I want. Thanks for sharing!
        • daleswanson11 days ago
          I literally just had this printed, following that same blog post. Would recommend Whitewalls, it was a very high quality print. I got the 12x18 size, kind of regret not getting it bigger, but I didn't have the wall space.
    • aktuel12 days ago
      If you open the image in a new tab you see that the resolution is good enough to order a print online from one of the countless print services.
      • righthand12 days ago
        Or ask your local print shop to make a print.
    • 12 days ago
      undefined
  • thinkingemote12 days ago
    #39 skull (dev/null) or daemon

    To me it looks like monkey face or like a cats face, a lynx? There is a tap / spigot above but I don't think tap wasn't much of a unix thing back then?

    edits:

    https://github.com/drio/unixmagic/issues/13

    > the top of head has an old time faucet handle and this might be referencing IO redirection (streams) as well as the stream of molten lava/magic brew.

  • psychoslave12 days ago
    #28, pwd, looks like a play on words with "powder" that you would put in a box.
  • ape412 days ago
    How about annotating the word "magic"? Of course there's /etc/magic that's used by the `file` command. By the way it identifies itself, doing `file /etc/magic` works.
  • dmazin12 days ago
    This is amazing. Does anyone know how to get a physical copy?
  • grandiego12 days ago
    The #38 is controversial as noted. To me it represents the branching of Unix flavors, mostly derived from the AT&T and BSD versions (represented by the glasses.)
    • nine_k12 days ago
      To me, the stuff that grows from a shell invocation must be a process tree.
      • tempodox12 days ago
        Quite. I felt reminded of Git but it did not exist yet in the 1980s.
    • k3vinw12 days ago
      Interesting. When I look at this I see printed circuitry like you would find on a PCB. In which case it could represent the electrons flowing downwards into the processor which powers the shell. And the power source might be the wizard himself or his beard.
      • righthand12 days ago
        The power source is the fire underneath the shell.
        • k3vinw12 days ago
          Ahh. Good point! Perhaps a better analogy would be that the brain processing power is represented by the circuitry. I’d be curious to other interpretations for why it appears where it does.
  • 12 days ago
    undefined
  • yazantapuz12 days ago
    When i see the brick wall i think of the -Wall option in gcc.