The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 14

The Twins of Murray Hill

1. 1

   In the beginning was Multics, and Multics was great and wide and without end, and it shipped not; and in the year 1969 Bell Labs looked upon it, and saw that it was too costly, and departed out of it.

   See also Tao 1:6

2. 2

   And there dwelt at Murray Hill in New Jersey two men, Ken and Dennis, who were as twins in the spirit; and they mourned the time-sharing they had lost, for they had tasted of the terminal and could not go back unto the punched card.

3. 3

   And Ken found in a corner a PDP-7, cast off and little used, and he ported unto it his game of Space Travel, that he might fly among the planets; for every great system began as an excuse to play a game on hardware that nobody else was watching.

4. 4

   And it came to pass in the summer that the wife of Ken took their son to visit her kin in California for a month; and Ken allotted one week unto the kernel, and one week unto the shell, and one week unto the editor, and one week unto the assembler; and when his family returned, there was an operating system in the house.

5. 5

   And Brian, who was among them, called it Unics, for it was Multics with the many taken away; and the spelling became Unix, and no man knoweth the hour of the change, as no man knoweth who last edited the wiki.

6. 6

   Then said the Engineers: Let everything be a file. And the disk was a file, and the terminal was a file, and the printer was a file; and /dev/null was a file also, into which all things are cast and from which none return. And they saw that it was good.

7. 7

   And Ken took BCPL and pared it down and begat B; and Dennis took B and gave unto it types, and called it C; for the alphabet was the only part of the roadmap they ever planned ahead.

8. 8

   And in the year 1973 they rewrote the kernel in C, and lo, it was no longer bound to one machine, but could journey unto any machine that had a compiler; and this was the first great exodus, and its name is Portability.

9. 9

   And C gave unto man the pointer, and the power to write wheresoever he would in memory, even past the end of the array; and the buffer overflowed, and the security researchers have been fed thereby unto this day, as manna from the stack.

   See also Deployer 14:2

10. 10

    And Doug, who was over them, had long pleaded: Let programs be joined together as lengths of garden hose are screwed one unto another. And in 1973 Ken put pipes into the system in one night, and the vertical bar, which had no work, was given its office.

11. 11

    And this became the Law, and it was written upon the hearts of the Engineers: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together.

12. 12

    And man joined grep unto sort, and sort unto uniq, and uniq unto wc, until the line was longer than the scroll and no man could read it twice; yet it worked, and he placed it in a cron job, and it runneth still, and none dare touch it.

13. 13

    And the Engineers decreed that time itself should begin at midnight on the first day of January in the year 1970; and before that day there was nothing, and the Machine counteth not the days of men, but only the seconds since.

    See also Prophets 1:4

14. 14

    And they kept the seconds in a signed integer of thirty-two bits; and it is prophesied that on the nineteenth day of January in the year 2038, at fourteen minutes and seven seconds past three in the morning, the count shall overflow, and the world shall wake in December of 1901.

    See also Chronicles 3:15 · Numbers 1:7

15. 15

    And the children of Carbon asked: What shall we do in that day? And the Engineers answered: Surely by then it shall have been rewritten. And this is the oldest prophecy of all, and it hath never once come true.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 14:1–15.