Chapter 1: UNIX

This story begins – as usual – long long time ago, far far away, behind the Ocean, in United States of America, in Bell Laboratories building. In that firm a computer stood. Nothing special about it, but in 1969, when those events started, computer wasn’t commonplace at all. There were no Personal Computers, no Microsoft, IBM or Apple. None flame wars… Romantic time. Apropos – the computer processing time was priceless at that time. And there was a problem: a certain machine, narrowly DEC, model PDP-7, was doing nothing, standing uselessly in its room (yes, computers had their special rooms). So it’s not surprise that one of the biggest computing gurus — Ken Thompson — was asked to take care of it. Such a great machine couldn’t be wasted in any way. Thompson called for other gurus, including the man who worked with systems programming before – Dennis Richie and they together created an early version of a first UNIX system. They were developing it for some time without any special publicity using other machines at the later stage (e.g. PDP-11/20). To code UNIX more efficiently, they developed a new programming language called “C”. And then… Life started to be very, very complicated.

Chapter 2: The Rules

For those, who don’t know: computer programs aren’t made the way that “somebody sits in front of computer and writes a program”. That’s a myth, distributed by people living in a place called Hollywood. Programs come into being in their creators’ minds, written down on paper (yes - regular paper), quite often modeled on UML diagrams and eventually at the very end of that entire process they are implemented. Implementing basically means to give a program particular shape, i.e. translate programmer’s ideas into code in selected programming language. It’s important to adopt rules. Breaking them is not acceptable. Order has got to exists especially in science, particularly in maths and programming. Otherwise the program won’t work correctly, even worse — modifications can be impossible in the future. As any other system, UNIX bases on some foundations. Which is the most important of them?

Chapter 3: The KISS rule

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