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David Mackenzie – A Personal History with Linux and BSD Unix [video] (youtube.com)
79 points by bhasi on Aug 21, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments


David Mackenzie is the author (or co-author) of many basic GNU utilities such as `ls`, `chmod`, `touch`, and many others. I was looking up the manpage for the `install` command today and came across his name listed as its sole author. I had some time to kill, so I looked him up and this fascinating video came up in which he discusses his early life and how he came to work for GNU and wrote all these utilities. I highly recommend watching this till the end.


Videos of this caliber are rare to find organically. I would have never otherwise known that he had a YouTube channel. Thank you very much for posting this.


you meant systematically or programmatically?

hearing from someone else is indeed organic


I appreciate the attempted correction, but I do mean organic. I don't know about you, but I definitely do not have many people in my daily life that would ever link or post about such a thing. Not only that, but I've had a YouTube feed that is 30% non-technical garbage for a couple of years despite my best efforts, thereby making an organic discovery even more unlikely. If I had been searching systematically, there's a good chance I could have found it, however I haven't really tried to hunt down many personal channels for such people.


His talks are great to watch, and the books on BSD design as well.


> His talks are great to watch, and the books on BSD design as well.

If you had to pick one book, which one would you select?


At 46:10, David is showing an article on AI and UNIX from UnixWorld magazine in 1984 and subtly comments "Nothing new there..."




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