That's such a cliffhanger. Looking forward to the next one.

Really enjoyed this one! Prof Brailsford... The David Attenborough of Computer Science history.

Imagining Professor Brailsford in California in the the 1970s makes me smile.

Always excited for a Professor Brailsford video!

I absolutely love Professor Brailsford. He's like this perfect confluence of talent and humanity. I'm grateful for every one of these videos we get with him. Keep up the great work!

I think I could listen to Professor Brailsford for hours on end and it wouldn't get boring.

Thompson & Ritchie were NOT a beach band duo or crazy music producers, despite that luscious photograph.

I've been using UNIX for nearly 35 years, and even today I still think it rocks!

i love how often professor brailsford sounds like a golden age jazz singer, recounting all the places he performed and the incidental legendary names that he encountered!

Can listen to Brailsford all day, so knowledgeable and entertaining at the same time. A true treasure!

I love to listening professor brailsford explanations and story tellings..

Probably got the shirt when he was teaching in California

Always love to here from him. I was around for non of these events, but I like the feeling of being told a war story by your granpa. Computerphile always relights my passion for the field of computer science, thanks for that.

This made me pull down my old Bell System Technical Journal, 1978 Vol 57, #6, UNIX TIME-SHARING SYSTEM. The motto says it all, “Devoted to the Scientific and Engineering aspects of electrical communication”. I can only smile at the description of AT&T as a Phone Company.

I could listen to Professor Brailsford stories all day long...

The Holy Trinity: Thompson, Ritchie and Kernighan.

11:45 "Actually, FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular." Now there's a quote. It's always nice to find academic writing with a sense of humor.

Professor Brailsford winging an American accent was golden!!!

this is probably the greatest cliffhanger of any computerphile episode :D

Always love hearing more about the computer history. Especially when it is told by Prof. Brailsford.

Prof. Brailsford is a treasure.

An upcoming video about "Reflections on Trusting Trust"?. I am seriously looking forward to it.

My father was an Architecture student at Oklahoma State 1980-84 and had to learn both Cobol and Fortran. That's an interesting possible connection! 🤔

This man's memory is absolutely incredible.

Oh, he's a great storyteller 🙂 can't wait for future episodes

To me it is cool that he lectured at CSUN where I graduated from even if it was 30 years before I went there.

Another great video. I started work in the Data Processing Department of a UK bank in 1987. They had librarians whose sole job was to receive paper updates to manuals and file them in the correct manual. For example we might receive 5 pages for a PL/1, COBOL, CICS, IMS or DB/2 manual with instructions on what pages they new ones replaced. In those days we really did have to RTFM.

Lores and storytelling. We love you, Prof. B!

There was no Internet, but you could get microfiches to put in your microfiche reader. At DEC we got a new set regularly. If you dropped the package, you were screwed.

It's immense historic talking about computer science by prof. Brailsford who have experienced the technological booming in the fist place.He is a dear person.

I'm so glad that we can get Professor Brailsford's amazing experiences recorded forever here on KZfaq

Ken and Dennis are on an absolutely different level.

I love listening to this man tell stories from the past, even though I can't relate to most of the experience.

Cambridge were allowed an IBM 370 "because they needed to work with US universities" - Algol68C was developed on it and used as one of the teaching languages, along with BCPL. The development team included Stephen Bourne who would go on to develop the Bourne shell on Unix.

It's always nice to see and hear you, sir.

Absolutely riveting stuff, could listen to Brailsford all day, fascinating guy.

I've been hoping for a new Prof. Brailsford video AND tinkering around with old Unix lately, so this is perfect.

Oh man, is this the compiler thing? Super cannot wait for next episode if so. Or, if it's not, that doesn't really diminish my enthusiasm. Can't wait!

Professor Brailsford needs a podcast

This bloke used to teach me about formal grammars. Always been useful to me.

RMS and Linus freed the world from the licensing circus.

Thank you Professor Brailsford! that was an amazing story and what a cliffhanger!

Love these right from the house's mouth kinda videos by the prof! His stories and story telling style is so so so good!

We had Unix V6 on a PDP 11/34 at Warwick in 1979 (and probably earlier). It was serving several of the professors and half a dozen students at the same time, all squished into 256k of RAM, with a 64k address space theoretically available to each and every program. Oh the joy we had trying to add features to the kernel (for which we had the source, of course) and still keep it within that limit! Finally moved up to V7 when we got a VAX 11/750 in 1981, and could breathe!

That's history of science class live. I love these videos and I'm not even into computer science. Thanks!

Unix changed my life, thank you Ken.

HBO called, they would like to buy your cliffhanger

Experience talking at it's best. Brailsford is an absolute genius.

Five users bogged down an 11/35? In the mid eighties, I was using mostly PDP 11/17s running RSTS/E. We often had 32 users logged in at once around the due date of our programming assignments, and it still felt like we had the whole machine to ourselves. The VAX 11/780 running VMS was much more powerful, but always felt more sluggish.

I am a simple man, I see professor Brailsford and I click (like).

I am already so hype for the next video.

I am looking forward to the next video. History of Computer Science is a very interesting topic!

You guys should make a full two hour documentary with this quality instead of 'just' those small snippets here and there every couple months.

He was teaching at Berkeley when Cliff Stoll was there

A week when @computerphile publishes a video with Prof. Brailsford is a very good week indeed.

Some day I hope you guys can edit up some of these into longer form documentary content, Professor Brailsford and the others are simply too amazing with their stories and histories

Thank you so much Computerphile.

Absolutely loved this history lesson.

When I arrived at UCL in 1984 I don't recall any ICL kit for undergraduate use, we were all on PDP-11s, and I think there were some VAXes, but definitely all running UNIX. At some point we got a Pyramid which ran System V and BSD simultaneously, that was very exciting.

What a marvellous storyteller he is

These videos are very important, really. While much of this history is already documented, I think it’s so important to hear these stories from the people who were there. Future historians will thank you.

Quickly! Someone hire this man to be life’s great narrator!

*NIX is the only system that can do real work. Its amazingly easy to use and build a workflow.

You see now the impetus for RMS to start the GNU project, given the increasingly draconian restrictions on AT&T Unix licensing as time went on. They were bad enough to begin with, but after the breakup of the telephone monopoly, with AT&T now free to fully participate in the computer market, suddenly Unix became a whole lot more commercially valuable to them, and so they became less willing to let Universities and others have it, with full source code, at anything resembling a modest price.

I can swear, and I want the rest of the story! Such a beeswax these operating systems, a blessing and a curse.

we love you, Professor Internet Grandpa

my college (in london) had a pdp-11/43 in the 70's & 80's. it ran rsts/e, though, not unix. they upgraded to a newer model and the students got 4,3 on it.

Documenting how and when the prosaic C first got its tendrils into UK universities and hence common computer parlance. Meanwhile zen-like Forth was eschewing the need for any kind of OS at all. Two philosophical paths: burgeoning complexity Vs irreducible simplicity...

Fantastic teaser at the end.

I took classes under a couple professors at Oklahoma State who may have been there; one who worked on the Algol 68 compiler, and one who still swore by Fortran in the 1990s.

I cannot imagine what the process of physically bringing Unix over to the UK from the US was like then. I’m old enough to remember floppies, but it’s still hard to think about what type of media would have held an OS in that era…

If that next video is what I think it is we are in for an absolute treat.......

Sussex had PDP-11s and some Vaxen by the late 70s (11-780s, I think). I remember playing about with ADVENT* in 1979 on a VT100 terminal hooked up to their timeshare system. I had a lineprinter dump of the entire text segment knocking around somewhere until it got binned during an overzealous spring clean. *Also Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, and Weizenbaum's ELIZA. Forty years later, the bug that bit me back then still has its jaws in me

Hey, I was at OSU in 1978, and I used Algol-68 there!

Back when C was a high level language

"It's déjà vu all over again" Yogi Berra "...then the status quo will return to what it was before" Murry Walker

I'm so hype about this!!! IMO the true story of linux origins is often mis-told, and this is the perfect setup for what i believe may go on to tell the story correctly. really hope that this is part of the series.

Twenty years later we were pushing our enterprise overlords to let Linux into the datacenter. They said no, so we snuck in through the backdoor. :)

UNIX might have been flawed back then, but the system requirements sort of retro-actively applied to its development in the early days. The Kernel itself (and UNIX as a OS Family) were heavily restricted by clock cycle speed and memory access speed (read and write) that it was necessary at the time to "cut down" the amount of security related features that originally were planned, and further, error debugging code in the UNIX Kernel. In the original system, for any major crash (which pretty much was any crash), all it did was run the command "crash" and essentially "BLUE SCREENED". Just thought it would be interesting to note. This is why OS' built on top of the UNIX system (and the like) - in the modern day - add bits to the kernel or its own structure to "fill in" these gaps. Even then, some still exist and can be exploited. Despite this, in some regards, its light weight nature actually makes it faster in some regards to other systems like Windows.

Well now I _really_ want to see the next one!

UNIX wasn't invented by AT&T or even Bell Labs; it was invented by Ken Thompson, who wrote it in three weeks while his wife was away, thinking he was going to get fired (they weren't allowed/given the budget to work on OS's). The guy's an f-ing legend and is as humble as pie - has so many great stories. He kept a pet alligator at his desk which once escaped which is how he began getting to know the staff. When I first heard of UNIX I thought: Why do I care about the history of some boring company? It's a shame people focus so much on AT&T and its Bell Labs and forget to talk about the _people_ who were involved.

Great story again, told by a great story teller! The shirt topped it of. I paused to get some 😎.

Love this man

I first hit Unix late 80's and it was total game changer. If it wasn't for X I reckon Unix would have taken over the desktop world as well. What a horror show that was/is

Ahhhh... the IBM 360/67 at Newcastle. I learned Cobol on it! (I'm 69, it was a long time ago).

Has anyone watched a video of Professor Brailsford and thought "Well, that's 15 minutes of my life I'm not going to get back". No.... me neither.

Oh dear god they're gonna do Trusting Trust.

How did you know his name was, Frank J. Riffle Junior? Well, he kept referring to himself in third person.

Great storytelling!!

More Professor B please! He is the f'ing bomb!

I started watching this, went to do the dishes, came back and wondered if this man ever stops waffling incesantly… And then I released it was on autoplay and I'd gone through about 5 vids. Hehe.

I was an undergrad in 1979, and teaching was done on an ICl with algol68. Punched cards and line printers. But if you asked nicely you could get to use the Harris Unix system with interactive terminals.

I love this video

Oxford got an ICL1900 installation with George and MOP

Thank God for Linus Torvalds, so now we don't have to deal with AT&T's crazy licensing schemes any longer! Can you imagine?! Not to take away from Bell Labs', nor Dennis Ritchie's, nor Ken Thompson's, nor Brian Kernighan's accomplishments, mind you. And only a company with AT&T's massive resources in the 1970s could've allowed these guys to do what they did. But I'm so very happy that we no longer have to deal with AT&T's licensing like we did back in the day. You can just install the OS and pay for however much support you want to pay for, if any.

What a different experience! I was at Stanford then and it was all gung ho, full speed ahead!

11:36 Can't wait for that Thompson exploit video! :D

OK that's a cliff hanger! Hey Brailsford - you and Cant from NTU forged me into the monster I am. (Richard not can't)

Great bit of history

Never forget. Frank J. Riffle is a man of his word.