UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use -- AT&T Archives film from 1982, Bell Laboratories
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- čas přidán 1. 05. 2024
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The Unix System: Making Computers Easier to Use - 1982
This 23-minute film about UNIX was designed for students with an interest in engineering, math, computer science or other sciences. The film was made available to the public in December 1982. It covers different ways that UNIX could be employed practically in a computing environment. Another film about UNIX released at the same time, "The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive," was aimed at computer science majors and corporate trainees, and presented a more detailed discussion of the UNIX system and its various applications.
Hosted by Victor Vyssotsky in a Carl-Sagan-esque turtleneck sweater, this film includes Dennis Ritchie, one of UNIX's inventors, along with Bell Labs staffers and programmers Brian Kernighan, Catherine Ann Brooks, Lorinda Cherry, Alfred Aho, Nina Macdonald, and John Mashey.
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson started work on what would become UNIX originally in 1969. They developed it to run on a DEC PDP-7 to begin with; it would eventually be ported to other computers. By 1976, UNIX was used in more than 30 Bell Labs groups, and there were UNIX installations at over 80 universities.
Footage Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ - Věda a technologie
The invention of UNIX and C programing language is one of the greatest contributions by Bell lab to the whole mankind.
Hmm maybe, but Lisp systems seem more advanced (although yes at this time LISP was very hard to implement in hardware).
Yes, along with their invention of the transistor
@Han Boetes they were n r corporate ppl
I don't know, transistors are probably also high on the list
no, no, stereo sound is definitely the most important one lol
You got to respect how chill Brian K is leaning back in his office chair, legs up, boots up on the desk all while he explains how to use some utilities on UNIX. True OG right there.
More like OMG as he’s one my my tech gods. And you see Leonard Aho briefly who inspired me to become well-learned, though likely not an expert, in language design and implementation (c.f. Aho & Ullman’s ‘dragon’ book, who’s name escapes me at the moment).
These folks indeed seeded the tech world with ideas that persist today.
Heck yeah! His explanation of a pipeline is the best I've ever heard
That's because, back then, programmers weren't expected to act like mature adults on camera.
As a professional I watch these videos and think... 40 years ago these engineers had so much more knowledge than I do now. You can tell that they see the big picture at such an early stage. I use what they invented every day, 40 years later... Amazing.
Yeah I feel the same. I'm now a Admin mainly for Linux systems and I love reading these old papers, books etc about this time at Bell Labs or in general. It's fascinating to read, why these programs were designed like this, about the short memory space, the thinking behind it and how these applications worked.. Its so far away for me because I was born in 1987. Its really interesting to read about it or watch these videos
Yes, because computers and software back than were a lot simpler in design plus it was new technology that didn’t required narrow field of expertise. Similarly like mechanics 70 years ago could basically rebuild or redesign a car and it is not so easy these days become the technology has evolved so much compared to the old days.
Forty years ago? More like sixty given that AT&T UNIX Version I was worked on beginning in 1963, if I have my facts right.
Six decades. But if you had typed your comment in twenty years ago, you’d certainly be correct in terms of time frames.
But what is also amazing is how LITTLE things have advanced since the powerful explosion of ideas of the 1960s and 1970s. Ritchie, Thompson, Aho are certainly gods of mine from the AT&T era of the early sixties. But another god of mine, having to do with GUI design, is Brett Victor who nearly a decade ago presented what is for me a seminal lecture, “The Future of Programming” (presented to Dropbox’s DBX conference on July 9, 2013, according to the video description).
Victor comes out dressed in impeccable early 1960 geek coiture… grey slacks, white shirt, pocket protector loaded with pens and wireless transmitter for his mic. He comically pretends to be speaking IN that era, citing “now that there are thousands of computers in existence” for ever, and initially focusing on the not-so-smooth transition from bit flipping in matching code (which I used to do in 1980 at MIT on an old core-based computer half-populated with 32K of hand-woven core memory and TTL no more complicated than the bitsliced 4-bit ALU of the time).
He then goes on to the somewhat futuristic notion of a graphic interface, and so on.
His key premise, and what fascinates me about this video, is how again and again revolutionary advances in software have NOT occurred, perhaps because of the inherent tendencies for humans to fall into increasingly well-worn grooves: What I used for the last project is what I should be using now. Python hasn’t radically changed since its inception, for example - we’ve just populated the space of supporting code libraries while not expanding what Python does in the first place.
In any case, I’m working on a little project which may address these issues. The combination of what Thompson and Ritchie were talking about in 1963 as key: ease of use, the ability to be used and understand by folks working in disparate domains with perhaps little or no technical training… coupled with quite a bit of inspiration from Brett Victor’s talk… and another about not coding dead fish worth checking out… these ideas are driving my project now transitioning from a research phase now rapidly into design and development.
At one time I had a playlist linking these two talks by Brett Victor, but the playlist appears to have evaporated on its own, so here are the individual links. He addresses the issue of typical animations (especially those produced by programmers) being somehow dead and artificial as opposed to the more fluid animations of professional animators… but both of these pale compared to virtual fish interacting in realtime to stimuli).
Quite brilliant. Victor is best known as being one of the contributed to the initial merging of macOS and iOS in macOS Lion 10.7. And that was the most horrid version of macOS in my opinion, not just for the transitional GUI which was later polished by Mountain Lion 10.8 and what followed. But the fault likely didn’t lie with Victor than the development culture at Apple in that time.
1of2: “Brett Victor The Future of Computing”
2of2: “Brett Victor - Stop Drawing Dead Fish”
I don't know about more knowledge… They had a different set of tools their knowledge was different. I'm sure that it would be very difficult for them to sit down and pick up your tools just as it would be very difficult for you to sit down and pick up theirs.
@@fiveminutezen I disagree. I think it would be just the opposite. They would love our modern tools. It would take some adjusting but they would excel with our modern frameworks. Take one of us and throw us back to building literally everything from scratch using theories with no stackoverflow? We would flounder for a very long time before adjusting.
This video should be mandatory viewing for all Computer Science students
I'm watching this for a course on C programming and Computer history. But if this vid has truly taught me anything, its that being a kid in the 90's meant that we missed out on what truly well educated video explanations were like. None of that distracting cartoony-hip-cool-nonesense. I was actually inspired by this.
9:36: Unix is not likely to be in the dictionary ever. Well it is, just checked Oxford English dictionary. Such was the lasting impact of Unix.
same for the german Duden :D
By dictionary they dont mean a Oxford dictionary its more of a list of words
video99.co.uk - It isn’t in my The New Shorter Oxford (1993). That the name appears in some general dictionaries is an indication of the loose standards of today’s dictionary editors rather than the lasting influence of Unix. Its influence may be lasting, but I still think it belongs only in specialized reference books. There are countless proper names of influential things which could be put in general dictionaries if you wanted to get into that practice.
The Book of Unix. Understanding the genisis of Unix. Realize it's the source and origin of Linux, Android and iOS. Bell Labs father, Alexander Graham Bell.
@@GH-oi2jf Yeah, but proper names becoming terms of art and then general usage words is a fairly standard migration. CF Heroin, Aspirin, Hoover etc. UNIX is a trademark of the OpenGroup but "Unix" is now commonly a generic term for a family of operating systems.
Dennis Ritchie RIP, look people :
a legend.
Overshadowed by Steve Jobs' death
@@thekidfromiowa Steve Jobs may not have if he didn't take fake woo woo medicine
Got a technology medal, should have got a Nobel.
There’s more than one legend in this video. Impressive.
The host is Victor A. Vyssotsky (1931-2012), mathematician, computer scientist, technical head of the MULTICS project and later Executive Director for Research Communication Principles at Bell Labs.
Victor Vyssotsky has a strong resemblance to Carl Sagan, in both mannerism and clothing style... but this video was recorded just a few years after Sagan's series "Cosmos" was very popular on TV, and they were both from Northeast USA, and similar age. (about 3yrs apart)
As a side note: Victor's father Alexander had a career in astronomy (30yrs before Sagan) first near Moscow, then moving to USA in 1923, and became vice president of the American Astronomical society.
@mauroandreolini5278 and @jsteins - Interesting info.
Dennis Ritchie in 1982 describes communal computing in its pure essence: "What we wanted to preserve was ... a system around which a community could form - fellowship... to encourage close communication." [3:33-3:55]
Ah, so,Dennis was responsible for 'social media' :)
"fellowship" says it all, great words from a great and humble man, may we still strive for such a thing.
It was everywhere like that in the early days of computers. Once computers became commonplace that era unfortunately ended.
Oz jak, because Dennis was a "computer nerd", and Steve was a businessman. Guess who capitalistic society honors more?
No more fellowship as nobody is truly selfless anymore.
Wisdoms are meant to be shared.
"This documentation is usually written by the developers. After all, they know the most about the equipment. But they weren't necessarily trained in how to write well..." I feel targeted.
Yeah, but we all know it's true. We're all guilty of it.
_"Why should I write exhaustive documentation about this thing, I know _*_exactly_*_ how it works"_
@@2thinkcritically exactly
@@2thinkcritically _returning to the code you wrote earlier the same day_
"What on Earth is this nonsense?"
Documentation is never necessary. Good code explains itself.
@@amycrunch3812 you must be saying that the majority of code is not good.
Lorinda Cherry at 16:00 casually having some coffee while her computer casually says 2^100 is a whole vibe, what a legend.
She passed away this month, and I'm very happy we can see this tiny bit of her in action here. Thank you for what you gave us Lorinda!
RIP
I did not know of Lorinda Cherry so thank you for enlightening me. This video is really fascinating.
That was indeed the highlighted and most-viewed moment in the video. I appreciated the humor of taking not one sip of coffee, but several.
What a gangsta!
As a software developer for over 25 years , this video touches my heart , big time
I owe my career as a Senior Linux Engineer to these guys, well and the guys who came after them and invented Linux.
Don't be too harsh on yourself, or them!
Linux and UNIX are different. Linux is the Kernel used in Richard Stallman's GNU project.
Monsieur Africain
GNU is a set of utilities that runs on top of Linux, just as other applications do.
@cyanghost109 true
@@MalamIbnMalam No, that's incorrect. Richard Stallman's GNU project never envisioned Linux to be its kernel, they have a different kernel called Hurd. People that uses Linux ported GNU project's userland applications into Linux so they don't have to write their own.
As history shows tough, Hurd never goes anywhere and now Linux becomes the de facto best replacement of the GNU kernel. But Linux is not a GNU project.
What a gift this was to us hoomans. Unix changed the world, forever. One hell of a footprint left in the sand of time.
I absolutely love the way Lorinda Cherry casually drinks from her cup.
_"Oh what, this computer working out this incredibly long number and then saying it in English to you, you call this amazing? I call it Tuesday"_
Grew up near Bell Labs and neighbors worked there. First job out of college was Octal Assembler on PDP-11/45 at Kodak. After a year at Kodak I landed at Oracle in the early 80's. We were switching from DEC VAX / VMS to UNIX. There were arguments about System V vs. Other flavors being the best.
Oracle required that we read K&R C and also Date and Codd relational theory.
Today I'm reading Donovan and Kernighan's Go book.
What a great career.
“So help me Codd”. Sorry- network database veteran here 😂
I remember we were learning C in one of my college courses. I thought their textbook was garbage and hard to understand so I found out about K&R C. My God, it was one of the easiest, most simplified books I've ever read on a complicated subject. I started doing better in the course once I had that book!
@@justinedse3314K&R C is a masterpiece. Should be required reading for every software engineer and technical writer
This video is literally a animating bible for software engineers. The essence of contemporary programming concept is just keep bursting out throughout this entire video.
I come to this video every time I deal with something terrible at work. Reminds me how it was when it all started, and how far we've strayed from your path almighty bell gods.
OMG .. as someone who’s made their living on Unix since 1989 and had to change disk packs for the 300MB CDC drives on a Wang System .. I could almost cry watching this! # sort * | uniq -c |sort -nr has been at the heart of my job for years!
Back in 1985 my CDC diskpack drives stored an amazing 500 MB and were slowly being displaced by slightly more compact Ampex 500 MB Winchester drives. Don‘t get me started on loading the OS using the Kennedy reel to reel tape drives! 😁
Impressive to finally see all the heroes who made the operating system I am using for 36 years now :). Thank you for this great film.
Presumably you have the BSTJ double issue?
RIP Lorinda Cherry 2022 13:48
These guys did more for computing than Steve Jobs could have ever hoped to, yet hardly anyone has heard of them and Jobs is revered as a god.
its just the reflect of our current society :D
*Marketing*
Sad indeed. Its because a sick society honours the dollar above all else.
But Steve got us NeXT UNIX on the Mac!
Cuz steve was a chad
It’s beyond amazing how Dennis Ritchie really had done so much for all of us.
Died around the same time as Steve Jobs and got a fraction of the hero-worship and praise
@@mahtism I agree.
The nerd smile after running talkcalc 2^100 at 16:00 is absolutely priceless!
+Nyana11 please re-evaluate your priorities
Exactly! The way she grabs the mug is a true action of orgasm! Hahahahahahaahahaha
Fredrik Jonsson Is it just me or does she look like Amy from the Big Bang Theory?
@gespilk technically that is doable, that is, they can make a program that lets you play around with stuff like that. However no one else needs that.
@gespilk you should look into wolfram language might be similart to what you want
"Cherry felt that one of the most unique aspects of Unix was the group attitude. Projects were not given out to people; instead, everyone was encouraged to come up with their own ideas and work on them either separately or in collaboration with others. Although she initially worked with others, usually concentrating on the programming aspects, after 1976 she worked on her own. The group also had the mindset of stringing things together, so everything could be used by everyone else and tools could work together. There was also a sense of ownership, namely that the last person to touch a program owned it and was therefore responsible for any changes made. Because of this attitude, one was hesitant to make changes unless it was absolutely necessary. The attitude became a form of discipline, resulting in simple, elegant code with a strong theoretical foundation. Cherry suggested that this attitude was also related to the environment in which they worked and compared their project to that from Berkeley. Although many of the commands are similar, she cited the example of the Cat command for which 85 flags were added in the Berkeley manual. She attributed this to the different size and environment, where 'everybody needs to find a niche so they've got to put a flag on something...that undoubtedly has to do with the university environment where everybody has to do something as opposed to [this environment] where in some sense everybody had to justify [what they were working on].'"
From www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs122/precis/cherry1.htm
Bell Lab by far underrated organization. It's backbone of current digital economy.
00:40:
"Look! I'm Carl Sagan! Wheeeeee!"
16:05:
*Sets the computer to calculate 2^100
*Sips tea like a boss
5:15 & 12:57+ Many years later, Brian refers to this exact pipe sequence in a Computerphile video.
link ?
@@runninggames771
czcams.com/video/vT_J6xc-Az0/video.html
at 7:11.
Brian Kernighan is probably the only one that look and speak natural in front of the camera
born in 1982 back then I just should be a protein. They call me now senior programmer. Senior? Rest in peace dennis ritchie, my senior programmer.
I wonder wasn't that the reason of falling the USSR?
@@ValAi178 The eastern block had Unix versions. In particular east germany had its own clones of UNIX SysV.
Lorinda Cherry wrote some powerful programs to check sentence structure and grammar as well as just spelling. We all used those programs, especially to check our technical papers (called TMs) before publishing them.
“UNIX is an example of a proper name, and is not likely to be in the dictionary ever” - Dennis Ritchie
UNIX is now in almost every recognized English dictionary. Even Ritchie didn’t know how revolutionary his work would be!
Gabriel G Was not that Brian (not Dennis)? But your point stands. How could they have known . . .just look at what Unix and its spiritual-if-not-actual progeny have brought the world. The transistor maybe was more important overall, but I believe Unix is not that far behind in importance.
Unix is arguably better known now than "eunuchs".
Finally found someone talking about it in the comments...I was gonna comment about the same thing!
I had a friend who acquired a couple of Sun computers, and he had them linked and three or four monitors across a wall and in the front of his room. He had a ping pong graphic screen saver bouncing from one monitor to the next and the next monitors, back and forth. He used only Unix. Ran everything, had virtual systems, real genius. He made one of the most fascinating fractals I've ever seen. An ever widening circle where zooming down you eventually reach an infinity symbol, circles, more infinity loops, and everything very smooth, no sharp angled branches as are so typical. Utterly unique. He worked collaboratively with ILM, was at Los Alamos at one time. Eventually devoted himself full time to debunking AA.
16:08 in her head she drops the mike , peace out
@gespilk No, it is a programmed voice. SH used an analog chip.
the talking calc was extremely impressive for its era
The second sip is what really drove it home for me that she was stuntin'.
Back in the day 'animations' that played at the end were pretty cool.
These two are unbeatable, no one close in IT industry who made such impact
Their impact goes beyond IT, more like general computing as a whole.
We watch this documentary with our 10 years old son. This is awesome
looking at those shells make me very thankful to have bash
GNU's not UNIX.
No. It was probably Bourne Shell - aka 'sh.' It might possibly have been Korn Shell, created by David Korn.
@@kreuner11 Yeah, that's not as convenient when working on a small terminal like that. The biggest annoyances I've noticed going back to very old Unix systems is the lack of tab completion, history and ability to edit the line you're currently writing (backspace usually works if you configure it properly, but rarely navigation). Other than that the shells provide the basic functionality you expect and would be fine to use even today, although with an abundance of powerful hardware why not use bash, zsh, fish or something else with a lot of convenience features.
It's amazing that this is still used today, I love her explanation of piping and the terminal!!
Also her flex with the system, then demonstrative drinking coffee and waiting was so fun too. :D
Unix changed my life, real talk
It brought tears to my eyes.
I still use it everyday! Brilliant people!
I do not use actual Unix anymore... Xenix entered my life along with Linux... I use Linux every single day though... I am using it right now on multiple fronts. This is a Linux household.
Directly derived from Unix. And the language used to build Linux also came from these guys - C. Even though Linux was written from scratch, it is essentially an exact port of Unix with relatively little deviation.
@@ChadMello Linux wasn't a port of Unix, it's a reimplementation/clone. And while it inherits many ideas from Unix, it deviates quite a lot in many important points
If you use MacOSX then yes you do!
Thank you! Dennis, Thank you! Ken. Sincerely!
A lot of this still holds up today, too! In my day-to-day job, I find command pipelining to be quite useful! The fact that one can easily chain together smaller programs to accomplish bigger tasks was a revolution to me when I first learned about it. I don't have to find or write some program that takes in FOO, does X operation, passes the output of X to Y, and finally passes the output of Y to Z, I can just tell the computer to do it with the programs that are already there!
I found this highly therapeutic and humbling to watch.
Damn, we've come far as a generation!
Which Tech organization today(2021) would you say is the equivalent of what Bell Laboratories was between the 60s-80s, with them leading the invention of cool Programming Languages, Operating Systems, etc, as of today?
WOW, what an sbsolutie treat to see Kernnighan, Richie and Aho educate professionally in their early prime. And yes, this was indeed the base of **all** computing today. Thank you, thank you.
What an amazing video. Seeing these luminaries all in one video is great.
I was 3 years old in 1982, but I remember going to work with my dad on Christmas Eve at his AT&T office building. I don't remember exactly when he began to take me with him, but it must have been at some point in the 1980s, though likely after 1982. I'm guessing it was after 1986 or 1987. Whatever year he began to take me with him, I miss those days of being there. I remember the cubicles where he and other workers had worked in. I remember exploring the building and finding a vending machine on the second floor. I remember my dad letting me use his computer to do whatever I wanted to do. I miss all of that.
I come back to this video often; I find it inspiring.
Brilliant. These guys are absolute legends. Glad I found this video.
Stepping stone to NLP, especially the part of the film. Great work, the world is forever indebted to these guys.
I can really see the passion in Brian - I can see that he's thriving while sharing his work. So cool.
Nix systems is my love. I am so thankful for the hard work they put into creating it.
Kernigan and Ritchie in one film - Outstanding.
so peaceful to watch. I feel blessed.
Legends
One of my favorite videos
16:15 kills, best comedy bit ever!
I cannot imagine how magnificent mind and creativity these men have to comprehend creating two magnificent things that are truly changed our life, technologies, an education. RIP
Wow! Inspiring video, great operating system and their creators. Thank you.
So many legends in one video! Thanks for Unix and C!
you were wrong, Brian: Unix is in the dictionary (as an uppercased proper noun, naturally)!
How did I never realize before this that the "shell" was imagined as a literal shell around a kernel
AT&T business folks completely overlook PC market... They had so many brilliant tech people and they missed every opportunity to bring Unix to home users. They didn't even let others do it - google 'Why is BSD not better known' if you're interested.
Actually other companies and government have decided to break into parts AT&T along with Bell Labs as they were afraid how big might they get. Politicians are the one who slowed down the Unix.
No, that's absolutely untrue. In 1984, AT&T Information Systems created something called The Unix PC. Their problem was that they were too far ahead of where the technology was, and it suffered from poor performance and high cost. This was Unix System V based machine. I remember them well. You can see more here: toastytech.com/guis/unixpc.html
Which company would you say has that many brilliant tech inventors today?
@@nathanjustus6659 Wow never knew about this Personal UNIX machine until now.
@Kent Teffeteller Just run the terminal in Mac OS, and most Unix commands work just fine. I always go this route when I need to debug my wife's Mac problems :)
This is GOLD
the ending is so perfect, music, visual... feeling of bright future
Those days are missed.
That segment of explaining formatless files using actual files was a well taught analogy.
This is probably the most beautiful video I've seen on youtube.
5:36 where he says ""one of the things about unix is the ability that we have to create complicated programs by building them
out of simpler programs. Rather than writing programs from scratch we can often construct them just by gluing together existing programs almost like building blocks." ... if all programs were written this way it would be like a snowballing effect.
Great video. It is superb to watch how things started
Love it.. I wanna build a time machine and go back to those days
16:12 she did it like a boss
@gespilk no
Great Video, Watched this one over 50 times or so...
this was awesome. totally relevant today. even in the year 2016 if i had to find a video to explain unix i might pick this.
Would you believe BWK considers himself a dinosaur?
if I had seen this back in 1982 , I would had been studying UNIX since that day, and today I would be a much better person... and richer
Thank you for the upload!
I use this stuff everyday but can't imagine having to work with the old school stuff. We have come a long way. Funny thing is I use the Terminal more now than any time in the past.
15:20 ...Hahaha, classic scene!! I will definitely be returning to watch this part many more times in the future.
This video is amazing!
When I worked in IT some time ago, our Unix systems stayed up and running for over 12 months (without rebooting).
Just no words. Absolutly stunning to watch those angels.
man insight right from the source, thanks for these gems
Fantastic!
It's interesting that Unix provides the mechanisms for combining simple programs into more complex programs, mentioned in the SICP book
5:15 The programs Brian K. uses to find spelling mistakes can be seen as primitive data and processes (building blocks)
12:58 Lorinda uses Pipelining for combining or gluing those simpler programs together, and then makes an Abstraction of that combination into a single file named "check".
Now check is a program that can be used as a unit to build more complex programs
New Dawn by Francis Monkman & Malcolm Ironton is the intro/outro music if anyone still wants to know!
Yeah cheers man
Damn, this has aged very well. I challenge anyone to find another industry whose predictions and practices from over 40 years ago are so clearly accurate.
Disagree. Aerospace engineering basics haven‘t evolved since the fifties, everything we see happening in IT and aerospace is evolution, not revolution based on leveraging improved semiconductors/materials…
I'm teaching a programming lab in a LISP derivative that uses a function not unlike UNIX pipes, and I sent my students this video.
Great video! Thanks!
I was very thankful to be working on the "client" side of a "client-server" system in the 90s. The client side was Visual c++ and the server side was Unix. My primary reason for my client side joy was the VI editor.
necessity is the mother of all invention
Very interesting video !
Great screens!
incredible
thank you legends
In 1.976 Unix was a powerful Operative System for Mainframes. In 2018 continue been very powerful O.S.
Amazing
Unix is the king
I'm watching this for a course on C programming and Computer history. But if this vid has truly taught me anything, its that being a kid in the 90's meant that we missed out on what truly well educated video explanations were like. None of that distracting cartoony-hip-cool-nonesense. I was actually inspired by this.
Amazing watching this on my phone and not a clunky computer just 40 years later
Here in 2023, watching this piece of pivotal computing history on a modern desktop system running the current version of a Unix-Inspired, open source OS called Linux, which to this day still maintains all of this design philosophy in the command line and under the hood; It can be used in the same way and these commands are still valid thanks to it using the GNU stack at its core. Even if the hardware has drastically changed over the decades, the interface has largely stayed the same in the console, it's just the graphical stuff evolved to fit the modern graphically focused paradigm we use today.