Musings

;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution

For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.

Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.

As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.

I read Brian Kernighan’s latest book recently, and many things in it struck chords with me. While the book was mostly about UNIX history, it was what Brian wrote about the influence that UNIX had on the development of computers, programming, and even printing that grabbed my attention.

For example, Brian pointed out that computers had been highly customizable machines that generally ran programs that were terribly inflexible. If you wrote files to disk using one program, you could only use that program, or a closely related one, to manipulate those files. UNIX, by comparison, uses byte streams for files, ones that can be opened by any program, even ones that can’t do anything sensible with the bytes, but that flexibility is enormous. Think of the old version of spell; that was a pipeline that converted a text file to a list of words, sorted those words, ran uniq on them, and then compared the results to a dictionary. None of those tools is unique to a spell-checking program. Today, spell is a binary, not a shell script, but you can find a version of the original script in Brian’s book.

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