| "Over a period from 1970 til ’72, I’d from time to time, say "How about making something like this?", and I would put up another proposal, another proposal, another proposal. Then one day I came up with a syntax for the shell that went along with the piping and Ken said, "I’m gonna do it." He was tired of hearing all this stuff... That was absolutely a fabulous day, the next day. He said, "I’m gonna do it." He didn’t do exactly what I had proposed for the pipe system call. He invented a slightly better one that finally got changed once more to what we have today. He did use my clumsy syntax... He put this notation into the shell [Here McIlroy points to the board, where he had written f >g> c], all in one night. The next morning we had this… people came in, people came in… Oh, and he also changed a lot of… most of the programs up until that time couldn’t take standard input, because, there wasn’t the real need. They all had file arguments. grep had a file argument, cat had a file argument. Thompson saw that that wasn’t going to fit into this scheme of things, and he went in and changed all those programs in the same night. I don’t know how. And the next morning we had this orgy of "one liners." Everybody had another one liner. Look at this, look at that." | "Over a period from 1970 til ’72, I’d from time to time, say "How about making something like this?", and I would put up another proposal, another proposal, another proposal. Then one day I came up with a syntax for the shell that went along with the piping and Ken said, "I’m gonna do it." He was tired of hearing all this stuff... That was absolutely a fabulous day, the next day. He said, "I’m gonna do it." He didn’t do exactly what I had proposed for the pipe system call. He invented a slightly better one that finally got changed once more to what we have today. He did use my clumsy syntax... He put this notation into the shell [Here McIlroy points to the board, where he had written f >g> c], all in one night. The next morning we had this… people came in, people came in… Oh, and he also changed a lot of… most of the programs up until that time couldn’t take standard input, because, there wasn’t the real need. They all had file arguments. grep had a file argument, cat had a file argument. Thompson saw that that wasn’t going to fit into this scheme of things, and he went in and changed all those programs in the same night. I don’t know how. And the next morning we had this orgy of "one liners." Everybody had another one liner. Look at this, look at that." (Doug McIlroy, [[http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/OralHistory/transcripts/mcilroy.htm|Oral History of Unix]]) |
