I think the spool with usr written on it most likely refers to the /usr/spool directory, where user mailboxes (and I think print jobs) were traditionally kept.
Somehow I had never heard of/seen this before. It looks like a prog rock album cover or something.
Some old commands in there I haven't used in a long time (poke, uucp), or never used - I think the troff I know is actually the one in GWBASIC (tracing off).
Much of the acceptance of UNIX at Bell Labs was due to its role as a typesetting system, with troff, eqn, and tbl commands. I worked for a UNIX support company (Interactive Systems Corporation) and our first customer was the U.S. Supreme Court because they deal with so many documents.
When I first started using Unix in school in the early 1980s, at least a third of the time was using nroff/troff, tbl and eqn. Maybe another 20% playing rogue. The rest was used to become a vi/ex advanced user, writing csh and awk scripts, and learning C.
The article mentions the "t" in troff, but doesn't mention that "roff" was short for "run off". I forget what the "n" was for.
DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC User's Guide: LISTREVERSE command
LISTREVERSE
LISTNHREVERSE
LISTREVERSE and LISTNHREVERSE print the contents of the
user's memory area in order of descending line numbers.
LISTREVERSE precedes the output with a heading,
LISTNHREVERSE eliminates the heading.
LISTREVERSE
EQUIV 10:53 13-NOV-75
40 END
35 PRINT "THE EQUIVALENT CURRENT IS",I, " AMPERES"
25 I=E1/R
10 INPUT R
5 INPUT E1
READY
I literally just had this printed, following that same blog post. Would recommend Whitewalls, it was a very high quality print. I got the 12x18 size, kind of regret not getting it bigger, but I didn't have the wall space.
To me it looks like monkey face or like a cats face, a lynx? There is a tap / spigot above but I don't think tap wasn't much of a unix thing back then?
> the top of head has an old time faucet handle and this might be referencing IO redirection (streams) as well as the stream of molten lava/magic brew.
How about annotating the word "magic"? Of course there's /etc/magic that's used by the `file` command. By the way it identifies itself, doing `file /etc/magic` works.
The #38 is controversial as noted. To me it represents the branching of Unix flavors, mostly derived from the AT&T and BSD versions (represented by the glasses.)
Interesting. When I look at this I see printed circuitry like you would find on a PCB. In which case it could represent the electrons flowing downwards into the processor which powers the shell. And the power source might be the wizard himself or his beard.
Ahh. Good point! Perhaps a better analogy would be that the brain processing power is represented by the circuitry. I’d be curious to other interpretations for why it appears where it does.
I think the spool with usr written on it most likely refers to the /usr/spool directory, where user mailboxes (and I think print jobs) were traditionally kept.
There are two more paintings in this series: Unix Views and Unix Feuds. High quality scans of all three are available on the internet archive.
https://archive.org/details/unix-magic
Somehow I had never heard of/seen this before. It looks like a prog rock album cover or something.
Some old commands in there I haven't used in a long time (poke, uucp), or never used - I think the troff I know is actually the one in GWBASIC (tracing off).
Much of the acceptance of UNIX at Bell Labs was due to its role as a typesetting system, with troff, eqn, and tbl commands. I worked for a UNIX support company (Interactive Systems Corporation) and our first customer was the U.S. Supreme Court because they deal with so many documents.
When I first started using Unix in school in the early 1980s, at least a third of the time was using nroff/troff, tbl and eqn. Maybe another 20% playing rogue. The rest was used to become a vi/ex advanced user, writing csh and awk scripts, and learning C.
The article mentions the "t" in troff, but doesn't mention that "roff" was short for "run off". I forget what the "n" was for.
"New" roff [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nroff
The TRS-80 has TROFF and TRON!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQoL_qpYbW0
More useful but not quite as magical as DECSYSTEM 10 and DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC's "LISTREVERSE" command!
https://web.archive.org/web/20210713130832/https://imgur.com...
Chalk one up for DEC and BASIC. What other programming languages support that feature, huh?
Now all you need is a COMEFROM and COMESUB and RUNREVERSE (or NUR) statements, and you can write reversible BASIC programs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Clock_World
http://bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-1...http://bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-2...
Emacs should have an edit-reverse-mode!
I liked Rocky Mountain BASIC with it's nice string operations and first class matrix operations.
I think it had a sort function too. But can't remember.
I would happily pay for a high quality print, but no idea where to get one from.
https://jpmens.net/2021/04/09/the-unix-magic-poster/
Awesome, that looks like what I want. Thanks for sharing!
I literally just had this printed, following that same blog post. Would recommend Whitewalls, it was a very high quality print. I got the 12x18 size, kind of regret not getting it bigger, but I didn't have the wall space.
If you open the image in a new tab you see that the resolution is good enough to order a print online from one of the countless print services.
Or ask your local print shop to make a print.
#39 skull (dev/null) or daemon
To me it looks like monkey face or like a cats face, a lynx? There is a tap / spigot above but I don't think tap wasn't much of a unix thing back then?
edits:
https://github.com/drio/unixmagic/issues/13
> the top of head has an old time faucet handle and this might be referencing IO redirection (streams) as well as the stream of molten lava/magic brew.
#28, pwd, looks like a play on words with "powder" that you would put in a box.
How about annotating the word "magic"? Of course there's /etc/magic that's used by the `file` command. By the way it identifies itself, doing `file /etc/magic` works.
This is amazing. Does anyone know how to get a physical copy?
The Internet Archive offers a 32Mb PNG file. Download that one and take it to your local print shop.
https://archive.org/details/unix-magic-poster-gary-overcare-...
They also have absurdly huge TIFFs of all 3 posters if folks are interested: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Gary+Overacre%...
Good idea, thanks!
One of the previous times this was posted, someone offered to print and ship them. I got a A2 sized canvas print. It hangs in my home office now.
https://jpmens.net/2021/04/09/the-unix-magic-poster/
The #38 is controversial as noted. To me it represents the branching of Unix flavors, mostly derived from the AT&T and BSD versions (represented by the glasses.)
To me, the stuff that grows from a shell invocation must be a process tree.
Quite. I felt reminded of Git but it did not exist yet in the 1980s.
Interesting. When I look at this I see printed circuitry like you would find on a PCB. In which case it could represent the electrons flowing downwards into the processor which powers the shell. And the power source might be the wizard himself or his beard.
The power source is the fire underneath the shell.
Ahh. Good point! Perhaps a better analogy would be that the brain processing power is represented by the circuitry. I’d be curious to other interpretations for why it appears where it does.
When i see the brick wall i think of the -Wall option in gcc.
Hmmm, it could also be the wall(1) program, which was already a part of AT&T Unix!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_(Unix)