It was an era for computer lib.
Unix - which is the operating system that underpins Linux servers, and Macs and iPhone and Android, all of that - Unix was developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and announced in July 1974.
The source-code to Unix - at least originally - is only 9,000 lines... and it's readable and it's beautiful. A world sketched in the sparest minimum of lines, and so, so right.
But it was closed. And so John Lions wrote this book for his students, "A Commentary on the sixth edition of the Unix operating system in 1974."
It's a great book. If you've ever wanted to know what a file is, or what a process is, you can read it there, in less than twenty lines. Worth a read.
But Unix was closed and copyrighted by AT&T, so Lion's commentary couldn't be distributed. It was photocopied in secret and circulated illegally, published officially only twenty years later in the 1990s.
Where is John Lions from, to have no respect for the privilege of corporations, to insist on that egalitarianism? The Department of Computer Science, University of New South Wales. Thank you Australia.
Matt Webb, Web Directions South 2014 (Sydney, Australia), October 2014