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The endless, tedious "Emacs versus vi" editor flame war—now going strong for four decades—actually traces its roots to slow 1970s printers at Bell Labs. Bill Joy developed vi largely because his ADM-3A terminal was painfully slow and lacked cursor keys, making Emacs-style line-by-line editing agonizingly frustrating. In contrast, Richard Stallman's...

Linux filesystems weren't always designed with sober clarity. Legend holds that ext2, once Linux's dominant filesystem, was sketched out during a particularly heavy drinking session at a local pub in France by developer Rémy Card and friends. A beer-soaked napkin held the initial design specs, hashing out block allocation strategies...

Unix admins often joke about the legendary dangers of rm -rf /, the nuclear option that promises digital annihilation. But surprisingly, certain early Unix systems survived such brutality without batting an eye. Thanks to filesystems structured in memory and carefully segregated partitions, some ancient Unix versions would let root blithely...

Unix's elegant pipe operator (|)—allowing sysadmins to effortlessly chain commands together—was invented largely because of programmer laziness. Douglas McIlroy, fed up with writing tedious intermediate files and shuffling data manually, demanded a simpler solution. His colleagues at Bell Labs grudgingly obliged, introducing the pipe as an inter-process communication mechanism. Laziness...