Top all-time · #2562
Éric Lévénez
Personal blog · levenez.comhistoryprogramming
Éric Lévénez's personal blog at levenez.com covers history and programming. Since 2008, 33 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “Unix History”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Most-linked posts?
- Unix History6 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-03-17
- Unix History6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2010-07-13
- Computer Languages Timeline6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2010-10-09
- The History of Programming Languages3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-05-08
- Computer Languages Timeline [pdf] (2022)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-02-08
- Other Unix Products2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-22
What Hacker News says?
Related: Unix History: https://www.levenez.com/unix/
Comment linking /unix/
on “The History of Unix, by Rob Pike [video]”Submitted Computer Languages Timeline [pdf] (2022) as a story · 55 points
HN discussionNot as accurate or complete as http://www.levenez.com/lang/lang.pdf , but a nice read. And if anyone is wondering (as I was) how many programming languages there are, http://people.ku.edu/~nkinners/LangList/Extras/langlist.htm has information on about 2500 languages.
Comment linking /lang/lang.pdf
on “A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of programming languages”Submitted History of 50 Most Popular Programming Languages as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis comment is misinformed. Unix has always been multi user, and has always (aside from earliest days before anyone heard of it) been able to compile itself. Minix does not stand for multi-user Unix. https://www.levenez.com/unix/ https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Document...
Comment linking /unix/
on “RetroBSD: Unix for microcontrollers”Submitted A History of UNIX Operating Systems as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe most impressive unix family tree I've seen is http://www.levenez.com/unix/ . Despite being simplified, when printed it's about 20 feet long.
Comment linking /unix/
on “Linux flavors and derivatives tree”Submitted Timeline of Unix history [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>the development of unix is something I'd be interested in reading more about http://www.levenez.com/unix/ has a good amount of info and links on the history of Unix and the people who worked on it. I came across the site a while ago and browsed it some. Interesting stuff, some of it at least. Recursively traversing the links should give even more.
Comment linking /unix/
on “Rich Command Shells”Submitted Unix Timeline as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's a much bigger one that takes lots of Unix variants into account: https://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png (from here [1]). Also available as a big PDF. Edit: Updated with newest version. [1] https://www.levenez.com/unix/
Comment linking /unix/
on “The BSD family tree”Submitted Other Unix Products as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere's also https://www.levenez.com/unix/
Comment linking /unix/
on “The BSD family tree”Submitted Unix History as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThat's basically two flavours of UNIX (Linux and BSD), but that's OK - others are unfortunately either dead or dying. The UNIX family tree ( http://www.levenez.com/unix ) has been shrinking so rapidly in the last few years, that the current situation looks like the early years.
Comment linking /unix
on “Things you (probably) didn't know about xargs”Submitted Unix History as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFor comparison, here is a screenshot of Concurrence: http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/Concurrence.gif
Comment linking /NeXTSTEP/Concurrence.gif
on “Steve Jobs: "I'll just sue you" (2010)”Submitted Computer Languages Timeline as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI had seen this a while ago, a brief diagram of Unix history, on Éric Lévénez's site: https://www.levenez.com/unix/ The page also has some Unix history and related links.
Comment linking /unix/
on “Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995 (2003)”Submitted The History of Programming Languages as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI hear this a lot, but I don't know why that's exciting. I remember using WindowMaker a bit as a kid & thinking it was fun & cool, liking the widgets, but it didn't strike me as radically different a desktop from everything else. NeXTSTEP's own "Features and Benefits"[1] 6 pager doesn't particularly feel illuminating / compelling either. I'm interested in object integration, object persistence, and object linking, b…
Comment linking /NeXTSTEP/NeXTSTEP.pdf
on “Nook Browser”Submitted Computer language history as a story · 1 points
HN discussionGreat graph! Another one I like is this one by Eric Levenez: https://www.levenez.com/unix/ . It's a little more detailed, as it includes specific releases and non-inheritance relationships, but it's only for Unix systems.
Comment linking /unix/
on “Operating Systems: Timeline and Family Tree”I always liked this massive PDF version: http://www.levenez.com/unix/
Comment linking /unix/
on “The Unix system family tree: Research and BSD”There is also a nice Unix family tree there: http://www.levenez.com/unix/ As it includes Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, HURD, OS X and their derivatives, the graph is huge but very interesting!
Comment linking /unix/
on “The Unix system family tree: Research and BSD”This article is outdated. For a pictorial story that's always current, I refer you to... http://www.levenez.com/unix/
Comment linking /unix/
on “The Creation of the Unix Operating System ”A big graph of the genealogy of programming languages: http://www.levenez.com/lang/
Comment linking /lang/
on “Ask HN: What are some good resources on the history of programming languages?”wrong chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX#Virtual_memory_map (although paging was in pdp-11 unix too, and neither was the 1st to have memory levels) see also: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/share/misc/bsd-family-t... https://www.levenez.com/unix/ https://www.tuhs.org/
Comment linking /unix/
on “Character by character TTY input in Unix, then and now”And another in timeline form: http://www.levenez.com/lang/ This one is my personal favourite. My wife got a print made around a year ago for our anniversary. It's around 3m long so we don't actually have anywhere in the house we can hang it!
Comment linking /lang/
on “Programming languages influence network”http://www.levenez.com/lang/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages_b... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm http://erlangish.blogspot.com/2007/05/shape-of-your-mind.htm... http://www.sigplan.org/pl-workshop/contributions/7.pdf http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3465 http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/paradigmsDIAGRAMeng101....
Comment linking /lang/
on “Visualization: The evolution of Python”
