Awesome. A Redditor emailed Ken Thompson about the UNICS to UNIX namechange. Actually got a reply https://www.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/1t826y8/emailed_ken_thompson_about_the_unics_to_unix/

#unix #history #computing

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A series of screenshots from Reedit thread showing email thread with Ken Thompson about the naming of UNIX. Thompson explains that Brian Kernighan (bwk) phonetically named it "unics" as a play on "Multics" but Thompson himself began writing "unix" on tapes to save them, and the name stuck. The rest is the history as they say...

vi depended heavily on terminal capability databases to remain
portable across different hardware terminals. Bill Joy originally
wired vi only for Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminals, and termcap was
born from the flood of requests for support on other hardware.

"Termcap Unveiled" by Douglas R. Merritt, pages 42-48.
https://archive.org/details/Unix_Review_1984_Sep.pdf/page/n43/mode/2up

Also updated my nvi notes with a small historical section about
termcap/curses and terminal portability.
https://repo.or.cz/code-notes.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/notes/NVI_Editor_Guide.txt

#vi #unix #termcap #nvi #linux

The limits are by design rather than oversight. Fixed
temp-file blocks and a line-pointer table capped at
LBLKS=900 in the default build give you about 230k lines,
or roughly 30MB of text. Beyond that, you get the classic
"Tmp file too large" — and that's fine, because a screen
editor isn't the right tool for huge files anyway.

Trade-offs worth knowing: no set ruler, single-level
undo, and a hard ceiling on file size. nvi is more
practical for daily work, especially if you live in YAML
where column awareness matters. But heirloom is closer to
the original, and the codebase is genuinely beautiful.
Worth a look.

For anyone curious about the details, I keep a longer note
on heirloom-ex-vi here:

https://repo.or.cz/code-notes.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/notes/Exploring_Heirloom_ex_vi.txt.

Updated today with the LARGEF rebuild instructions for
files beyond the default ceiling.

#vi #unix #suckless #nvi

3900 seconds left until 1777777777

#epoch #time #unix #unixtimer #timer #timestamp #1777777777

sxhkd handles the keys.
the WM handles the windows.
dmenu handles the launching.

swap any one. the others don't notice.

#suckless #unix #dwm

A new UNIX snapshot from 1977 to be released soon!!!

#unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

We've recovered another UNIX distribution that hasn't been seen in almost 50 years!

This is UNIX Program Generic Issue 3 from 1977-04-12. It descends from V6 and evolved into System III. We thought it didn't survive, but it turned up in some tapes @bitsavers read yesterday!

You can run it in SIMH with scripts I wrote, browse the sources in the Unix Tree (thanks Warren!) or from a tar, or read the Program Generic documentation (thanks Matt!).

https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2026-April/033605.html

#unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

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UNIX evolution tree highlighting UNIX Program Generic Issue 3. From page 32 of "A Statistical Examination of The Evolution of the UNIX System" by Shamim Sharifuddin Pirzada, September 1988, PhD thesis, Imperial College London. https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Theses/Shamim_Sharfuddin_Pirzada-1988-PhD-Thesis.pdf