Cannot help but sharing a historic video

People that know me know that I do whatever I can in order to avoid watching videos online if there’s any other way to get to the content. It may be that I’m too old-fashioned, or that I have low attention and prefer to use a media where I can quickly scroll up and down a paragraph, or that I feel the time between bits of content is just a useless transition or whatever…

But I bit. And I loved it.

A couple of days ago, OS News featured a post titled From the AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System. It links to a couple of videos in AT&T’s Youtube channel.

I watched AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System, an amazing historic evidence: A 27 minute long documentary produced in 1981 covering… What is Unix. Why Unix is so unique, useful and friendly.

What’s the big deal about it? That this document shows first-hand that we are not repeating myths we came up with along the way: The same principles of process composition, of simplicity and robustness, but spoken directly by many core actors of the era — Brian Kernighan (who drove a great deal of the technical explanation), Alfred Aho, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson… And several more I didn’t actually catch the names of.

Of course, the video includes casual shots of life at AT&T, including lots of terminals (even some of which are quite similar to the first ones I used here in Mexico, of course), then-amazing color animation videos showing the state of the art of computer video 35 years ago…

A delightful way to lose half an hour of productivity. And a bit of material that will surely find its way into my classes for some future semester :)

[ps] Yes, I don’t watch videos in Youtube. I don’t want to enable its dirty Javascript. So, of course, I use the great Youtube-dl tool. I cannot share the video file itself here due to Youtube’s service terms, but Youtube-dl is legal and free.