A coupla-few weeks ago I was pretty deep down the wikihole, poking through bits of Unix lore. Everyone knows Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (for certain value of “everyone”) - their names are Legend - but the name that caught my attention was one I wasn’t familiar with: Douglas McIlroy.
Okay, Wikipedia…teach me who’s a Dougie.
First up: he “…developed several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr”. Some pretty legit credentials so far. Even more impressive, he’s “best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines”. So this dude didn’t just “write some programs”, he contributed to some pretty fundamental bits of Unix philosophy itself.
What really caught my eye was when I got around to reading about man pages. [citation needed] (natch), but: “The first actual man pages were written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at the insistence of their manager Doug McIlroy in 1971.”
Whoa.
So this isn’t just “Some Unix OG” - this is the dude that told Thompson and Ritchie what to do?!
…and I’d never even heard his name before.
Mind: blown.