Doug McIlroy, the first ever UNIX user, visited us at LRC today. He introduced bare m4, a single-operation version of the m4 macro processor with only define, which is nonetheless Turing-complete. “This I decline to explain”, he said on this slide.
Someone hacked sh to print “haha” when you mistype chdir as cd.
LRC 2026
I’m looking forward to playing with these Java Cards I got at LRC. They’re cards programmable with an embedded subset of the JVM. It’s the strangest architecture I know of and I’ve been wanting to get my hands on some for a while.
I've written up a retrospective on my UNIX V4 workshop at Low Resource Computing, highlighting the cool things people accomplished and learned, along with snapshots of the filesystem throughout the workshop. It was a lot of fun!
It was a privilege sharing my UNIX system with Doug McIlroy!
He setup an account for himself. Having used these tools from the start, it came naturally, but he was accustomed to later versions of ed that allow omitting the closing slashes and the later passwd format.
Here was his session:
https://github.com/thaliaarchi/unix-v4-demo/blob/main/logs/dc1.log#L3439-L3705
@thalia A Heathkit terminal!? My heart swoons. Learned so much banging on an H89 (same form factor but with floppy drive and CPU board) as a teen and then used H29 terminals off a pair of VAX 11/780’s (agnes and thor) freshman year of college, before the Suns and SGI’s took over. Sigh…
@thalia iirc "subset of the JVM" isn't exactly technically misleading, but the subset is so severe that it's really just a completely separate platform that happened to want to be on the Java bandwagon, back when Java was the new hot thing
I looked at these back when they were a thing (and I was an embedded software researcher) and they're pretty cool! but I never did anything with them
@regehr If it wasn't Java, then Java wouldn't be running on 3 billion devices! We can't have that! Just imagine if JavaScript was Java…
@regehr @thalia many years ago, we implemented a tcp/ip stack and a web server on a javacard http://www.citi.umich.edu/techreports/reports/citi-tr-99-3.pdf
@peterhoneyman @thalia awesome!!
@thalia I recall a video about javacard. It seemed hellish being wrapped like 3 layers deep
@thalia wow, that's really cool!
Aug 27, 2026, 4:56 PMMy name drop is one time Doug McIllroy emailed me to tell me he liked some software I wrote. Truly the high point of my career.
@thalia McIlroy pointing to screen: "It's a Unix system! I know this!"
Aug 28, 2026, 4:09 PM@thalia @jonn_blanchard I sent him mail out of the blue a few months ago with a question about something on his website, and I was so excited when he responded.
Aug 27, 2026, 6:19 PM@thalia that is truly excellent 👌👌👌