Ken Thompson Wrote an OS in 3 Weeks: The Untold Story of Unix
Learning about "The Unix Time-Sharing System"
This deep dive into Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson's classic paper uncovers the surprising origins of Unix, from Thompson's quest to optimize disk throughput on a GE-645 to his wife's three-week vacation that gave him time to finish the OS. It highlights the revolutionary concept of separating data from programs, the birth of the exec system call, and the legacy of 'runcoms' in today's /etc/rc scripts. A must-read for anyone curious about how Unix's design principles still shape computing.
The peripherals were great...it had a set of disks that were faster than anything that I could imagine, and I wanted to write drum seeking algorithms, I wanted to get throughput on drums because everything I knew in the computer center or in Multics couldn't deal with drums well...Basically they would say "read" and wait for the read to come back, but what you want to do is simultaneous overlapped reads.