Forty years ago this month, Ken Thompson spent the month with a DEC pdp-7 and wrote from scratch a text editor (ed), an assembler (as), and the very first Unix kernel (unix). He told his boss at Bell Labs that the work was aimed towards automating software documentation but in fact was performed to play Spacewar and chess.
It was a remarkable achievement. Not because of the amount of code as others have done more in less time, but because of the idea of a real operating system hosted on an inexpensive minicomputer was so antithetical to the then near universal idea of humongous mainframes, too many kilograms of arcane user manuals, and wait-your-turn punch card batch processing.
What is it about computer chess that attracts minds like Shannon, Turing, and Thompson? (Admittedly, it draws many less luminaries, too.)
Forty years ago this summer, I taught myself how to program. And I considered writing a chess program although I didn't get around to designing one until several years later. But never did I consider writing an entire operating system just to get a chess program running.
Forty years ago this month
Moderator: Ras