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I'd argue that ordinary programmers can perform the same *type* of exercises if they:

- Put away a few weeks and go into Hermit mode;

- Plan ahead what projects they have in mind, which books/documents to bring with them. Do enough research and a bit of experimental coding beforehand;

- Reduce distraction to minimum. No Internet. Dumb phone only. Bring a Garmin GPS if needed. No calls from family members;

I wouldn't be surprised if they could up-level skills and complete a tough project in three weeks. Surely they won't write a UNIX or Git, but a demanding project is feasible with researches allocated before they went into Hermit mode.

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richardlblair 2 days ago | parent [-]

I also think people under estimate how much pondering one does before starting a project.

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markus_zhang 2 days ago | parent [-]

I think so. I don't think Ken had zero thought about UNIX and then suddenly came up with a minimum but complete solution in under 3 weeks. Previous experience also tells a lot too. Wozniak was able to quickly design some electronics, but he probably already bagged 10,000 hours (just to borrow the popular metaphor) before he joined HP.

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nyrikki a day ago | parent [-]

They both had been working on the Multics project for Bell Labs before they pulled out of the project and had written several languages already.

While some ideas like hierarchical filesystems were new it was mainly a modernized version of CTSS according to Dennis Ritchie's paper "The UNIX Time-sharing SystemA Retrospective"

I was playing with this version on simh way too late last night, taking a break from ITS, and being very familiar with v7 2.11 etc.. It is quite clearly very cut down.

I think being written in Assembly, which they produced by copying the DEC PAL-11R helped a lot.

If you look through the v1 here:

https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v...

It is already very modular, and obviously helped by dmr's MIT work:

https://people.csail.mit.edu/meyer/meyer-ritchie.pdf

But yet...work for years making an ultra complex OS that intended to provide 'utility scale' compute, and writing a fairly simple OS for a tiny mini would be much easier....if not so for us mortals.

It isn't like they just came out of a code boot camp...they needed the tacit knowledge and experience to push out 100K+ lines in one year from two people over 300bps terminals etc...

	▲	ForOldHack a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"EDIT: This was created to collect everything:" Wow. Amazing. Dennis would have been proud. Thank you, and thank everyone for their work. Thanks.
	▲	markus_zhang a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah. They were pretty professional by then :D