In 2016 I was inspired to run a series of DIY workshops on the command line and the Unix philosophy generally. I’d been chatting with a handful of friends about interest in learning more about the history of Unix and non-graphical interfaces. I chose the name “Unix Time” as a tribute to the time convention of the same name, and we met for several months in Red Hook, Brooklyn at Beam Center.
I recall these workshops having been pretty fun: a nice group with both technical and non-technical people showed up, and we worked thru some command line and Unix basics (how do I execute a command? what does it look like to setup my shell?) all the way thru to headier parts of the Unix ecosystem like wall, talk, and telnet.
I can’t remember if this was Allen or Sam’s idea but at some point the group co-authored a bash script to produce On Kawara’s Date Paintings from the command line! Here’s that script, for perpituity:
i=0
while read d; do
i=$((i+1))
echo $d | convert \
-size 800x500 \
xc:black \
-pointsize 60 \
-fill white \
-gravity center \
-font /usr/share/fonts/truetype/futura/futura.ttf \
-draw "text 0,0 '$(cat - | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]')'" \
-paint 2 jpg:- > "kawara-${i}.jpg"
done < "${1:-/dev/stdin}"
convert -delay 120 -loop 0 kawara-*.jpg gif:-
Jason mentioned Unix Time at his birthday party recently, and I was inspired to re-upload the syllabus for the Unix Time workshops at unixtime.bigboy.us. This syllabus used to be on a Unix server I’d rented specifically for Unix Time — everyone had their own proper Unix user accounts — but at some point in our telnet explorations, I exposed a telnet server that was immediately hacked and so I had to take the server down.
We continued to meet well beyond this syllabus, although at some point things petered out. I’m hoping this syllabus — while not a complete artifact showing all of the cool things the people in the workshops did — can at least act as a signpost for people with similar interests in the future.