Here's a 25-minute podcast about my experiences learning to program and the central role that C played in the journey.
This podcast was spawned from the hashtag #firstsevenlangs, which for me were:
One interesting question raised in this podcast -- the Apple II clearly isn't a Unix clone, but the Mac borrowed lots of ideas from Unix. Did Woz play with Unix before designing the Apple II?
Hope to do a bunch more of these. I want to start talking more about the internals of software. As I explain in the podcast, I've been focused on "poets" for my career, but underneath it all there are a few new software ideas that haven't been well-enough discussed, and the things we learned are not reflected in other people's software. It's now time in my career to think about passing off, so I want to be sure to cover the important stuff. But first we have to talk about the foundation, and for me that was C and Unix and how they were one and the same, how a language could be the core of an OS and how an OS could be the core of a language. And how C was both a machine language and a high-level language (something I did not go into great detail in, in the podcast).
C and Unix integrated two big concepts in two dimensions. Once I saw it could be done, I wanted to do it for storage and editing too. And that's what Frontier is/was.