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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

Very cool to see an illustrated version of my favorite software origin story :)

For a more detailed explanation, Brian Kernighan's "UNIX: A History and Memoir" is fantastic, released just a few years ago.

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I read that book the last summer (highly recommend it for a beach lecture) and, after years of back and forth between Unix and Windows, I finally ended using Unix as my dailiy driver.

Call me whatever, but by reading the story, everything got aligned in my head. What I saw as complex and dumb decisions, suddenly made sense and I really appreciate how things work.

Too bad Dave Cutler didn’t write a memoir.

I'm sure the NT kernel is a marvel but I'm afraid it's too late for me now :-)

The book 'Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft' is a really great read on Dave Cutler.

I would love more 'tech origin stories'. Next I am planning to read 'Soul of a new machine'. Another one I enjoyed was 'Open: How Compaq Ended IBM's PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing'

judging from how i've read other people describe him, Dave Cutler's personality seems antithecal to memoirs or biographies, from what I've read he seems to be very much like John Carmack in his total lack of sentimentality. Thankfully some enterprising people have managed to get him to sit infront of a camera, but its pretty light on the nitty gritty technical aspects:

- Computer history museum interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY - David Plummer's interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE

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