Annotated Unix Magic Poster

Posted by kaycebasques 4/5/2025

Annotated Unix Magic Poster(unixmagic.net)

213 points | 32 comments

schoen 4/5/2025|

I think the spool with usr written on it most likely refers to the /usr/spool directory, where user mailboxes (and I think print jobs) were traditionally kept.

ozbonus 4/5/2025||

There are two more paintings in this series: Unix Views and Unix Feuds. High quality scans of all three are available on the internet archive.

dfc 4/5/2025|

https://archive.org/details/unix-magic

badc0ffee 4/5/2025||

Somehow I had never heard of/seen this before. It looks like a prog rock album cover or something.

Some old commands in there I haven't used in a long time (poke, uucp), or never used - I think the troff I know is actually the one in GWBASIC (tracing off).

jibal 4/5/2025||

Much of the acceptance of UNIX at Bell Labs was due to its role as a typesetting system, with troff, eqn, and tbl commands. I worked for a UNIX support company (Interactive Systems Corporation) and our first customer was the U.S. Supreme Court because they deal with so many documents.

PopAlongKid 4/5/2025||

When I first started using Unix in school in the early 1980s, at least a third of the time was using nroff/troff, tbl and eqn. Maybe another 20% playing rogue. The rest was used to become a vi/ex advanced user, writing csh and awk scripts, and learning C.

The article mentions the "t" in troff, but doesn't mention that "roff" was short for "run off". I forget what the "n" was for.

abetusk 4/5/2025||

"New" roff [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nroff

DonHopkins 4/5/2025||

The TRS-80 has TROFF and TRON!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQoL_qpYbW0

More useful but not quite as magical as DECSYSTEM 10 and DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC's "LISTREVERSE" command!

https://web.archive.org/web/20210713130832/https://imgur.com...

Chalk one up for DEC and BASIC. What other programming languages support that feature, huh?

Now all you need is a COMEFROM and COMESUB and RUNREVERSE (or NUR) statements, and you can write reversible BASIC programs!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Clock_World

    DECSYSTEM 20 BASIC User's Guide: LISTREVERSE command

    LISTREVERSE
    LISTNHREVERSE

    LISTREVERSE and LISTNHREVERSE print the contents of the
    user's memory area in order of descending line numbers. 
    LISTREVERSE precedes the output with a heading,
    LISTNHREVERSE eliminates the heading.

    LISTREVERSE

    EQUIV             10:53                      13-NOV-75

    40    END
    35    PRINT "THE EQUIVALENT CURRENT IS",I, " AMPERES"
    25    I=E1/R
    10    INPUT R
    5     INPUT E1

    READY

http://bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-1...

http://bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-2...

Emacs should have an edit-reverse-mode!

Gibbon1 4/5/2025||

I liked Rocky Mountain BASIC with it's nice string operations and first class matrix operations.

I think it had a sort function too. But can't remember.

liendolucas 4/5/2025||

I would happily pay for a high quality print, but no idea where to get one from.

jiveturkey 4/5/2025||

https://jpmens.net/2021/04/09/the-unix-magic-poster/

liendolucas 4/5/2025||

Awesome, that looks like what I want. Thanks for sharing!

daleswanson 4/6/2025||

I literally just had this printed, following that same blog post. Would recommend Whitewalls, it was a very high quality print. I got the 12x18 size, kind of regret not getting it bigger, but I didn't have the wall space.

aktuel 4/5/2025|||

If you open the image in a new tab you see that the resolution is good enough to order a print online from one of the countless print services.

righthand 4/5/2025||

Or ask your local print shop to make a print.

thinkingemote 4/5/2025||

#39 skull (dev/null) or daemon

To me it looks like monkey face or like a cats face, a lynx? There is a tap / spigot above but I don't think tap wasn't much of a unix thing back then?

edits:

https://github.com/drio/unixmagic/issues/13

> the top of head has an old time faucet handle and this might be referencing IO redirection (streams) as well as the stream of molten lava/magic brew.

psychoslave 4/5/2025||

#28, pwd, looks like a play on words with "powder" that you would put in a box.

ape4 4/5/2025||

How about annotating the word "magic"? Of course there's /etc/magic that's used by the `file` command. By the way it identifies itself, doing `file /etc/magic` works.

dmazin 4/5/2025||

This is amazing. Does anyone know how to get a physical copy?

probably_wrong 4/5/2025||

The Internet Archive offers a 32Mb PNG file. Download that one and take it to your local print shop.

https://archive.org/details/unix-magic-poster-gary-overcare-...

zelse 4/6/2025|||

They also have absurdly huge TIFFs of all 3 posters if folks are interested: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Gary+Overacre%...

dmazin 4/5/2025|||

Good idea, thanks!

darnir 4/5/2025|||

One of the previous times this was posted, someone offered to print and ship them. I got a A2 sized canvas print. It hangs in my home office now.

jiveturkey 4/5/2025||

https://jpmens.net/2021/04/09/the-unix-magic-poster/

grandiego 4/5/2025||

The #38 is controversial as noted. To me it represents the branching of Unix flavors, mostly derived from the AT&T and BSD versions (represented by the glasses.)

nine_k 4/5/2025||

To me, the stuff that grows from a shell invocation must be a process tree.

tempodox 4/5/2025||

Quite. I felt reminded of Git but it did not exist yet in the 1980s.

k3vinw 4/5/2025||

Interesting. When I look at this I see printed circuitry like you would find on a PCB. In which case it could represent the electrons flowing downwards into the processor which powers the shell. And the power source might be the wizard himself or his beard.

righthand 4/5/2025||

The power source is the fire underneath the shell.

k3vinw 4/5/2025||

Ahh. Good point! Perhaps a better analogy would be that the brain processing power is represented by the circuitry. I’d be curious to other interpretations for why it appears where it does.