The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
Thanks for submitting this. I did the interview.  I think you have to listen to it to get the full experience.  But here are some things that were interesting and surprising from the interview:<p>The UNIX room - The unix room at bell labs was a shared room where they would hang out and have coffee.  Some people worked exclusively in the UNIX room, like Ken Thompson, but most worked in their private offices and came to the UNIX room to share what they worked on and have a coffee and catch up. This room was the culture center of the computing group at Bell Labs.<p>Because they were all sharing a file system on a single machine, it was easy for various people to iterate on programs.  They only had one rule which was if you changed the program last, you were the owner.  In some ways, it mirrors how open source works today.<p>Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible.  Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembler and B interpreter for a mini-computer that ran a printer they were struggling with, in a couple of days, so that they could get it printing again. This blew Brian's mind.<p>At the time, Brian didn't think that the work they were doing was 'important' in a big sense.  The culture was more like working with computers is hard, let's try to make it better and lets try to solve practical problems.<p>The book "Unix: A History and a Memoir" has many other great details.