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awk — the text-processing language baked into every Unix system since 1977 — takes its name from the initials of its creators: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. In a field overflowing with whimsical acronyms, naming a tool after yourself is either admirably honest or audaciously immodest. awk is...

Tony Hoare invented the null reference in 1965 while designing the ALGOL W language, simply because it seemed the easiest way to represent the absence of a value. He later called it his "billion dollar mistake" — a conservative estimate, given the decades of segfaults, NullPointerExceptions, and entire categories of...

Bill Joy wrote vi in 1976 over a single weekend, on a terminal so slow that watching characters appear on screen was a spectator sport. To compensate for the lag, he invented modal editing: a scheme where the same keystrokes mean entirely different things depending on which mode you're in....

Before cron, running a job at 3am meant either staying up or befriending whoever managed the mainframe batch queue — a proposition most Unix programmers found deeply unappealing. Ken Thompson wrote the first cron daemon for Unix V7 in 1979, waking up every minute to check if anything needed running....