This is an archival site
'What you think is going on, is going on'
Novices to the system could experiment, linking different commands together for what they thought should be the output. And very often their "pipes" worked the first time!
Joe Condon, left, and Ken Thompson work on a chess playing program they developed, called 'Belle.'
When Joe Condon, the owner of the PDP-7 that Thompson first used for UNIX, started using UNIX himself, he asked a co-worker how to do a certain function. "'What do you think is the reasonable thing to do, Joe?'" he was asked in return.
"That was a very interesting clue to the philosophy of how UNIX worked," Condon later said. "The system worked in a way which is easy to understand. It wasn't a complex function, hidden in a bunch of rules and verbiage and what not."
"Cognitive engineering" is what Condon called it, "...that the black box should be simple enough such that when you form the model of what's going on in the black box, that's in fact what is going on in the black box."
Next: The manual even warned of bugs
![[ UNIX building blocks ]](images/86-300838-EM.jpeg)