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Unix Operating Systems Software

Visual Map of Unix history 214

Posted by CmdrTaco from the are-you-confused-yet? dept.
psychosis writes "A friend pointed me towards this site that has a really interesting diagram of the History of Unix. It shows where all the development splits occured, recombined, and dissolved into the ether. The diagram is available in several different formats (html, pdf, and PS), so all can enjoy!"
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Visual Map of Unix history More

Visual Map of Unix history

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  • Re:Isn't it ironic (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Windows won because it ran on everybody's systems. Everybody avoided OS/2 because it was from IBM, and coupled at the time with the IBM Microchannel hardware, everybody figured it was a trap IBM had set to snare everyone back into their proprietary hardware.

  • Re:Not new (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You want to purchase "A Quarter Century of Unix" by Salus. ISBN 0-201-54777-5. Order it from Bookpool [bookpool.com] or your favorite local bookseller. (Friends don't let friends order from Amazon.com)

    'Quarter Century' is the definitive history of Unix.

  • NeXTStep was not a UNIX (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Geez, the inclusion of Steve Jobs ugly mug and the little footnote about NeXTStep being the "best UNIX" really give away this guy's biases.

    NeXTStep was not a UNIX. It was NOT derivative of BSD. It had a Mach kernel (which is not UNIX), with a display system and object oriented set of GUI libraries.

    It used a BSD filesystem, had BSD file management utilites (i.e mv,cp,rm,ln, etc.) and had a C shell. That does not a UNIX make. NeXTStep/ OpenStep were never POSIX compliant, and never had the full set of system calls that even a poor implementation of either BSD or SYSV would have.

    I remember what open source software was like 10+ years ago. I compiled lots of it. Occasionally I'd see a NeXT port of an open source app, and it'd almost always require massive patching to get it to compile. NeXT's simply didnt have the innards of a UNIX.

  • Re:They missed the part... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Don't you mean the point where it became merely the program-loader for Emacs?

  • Minix - Linux ?! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why does it show Linux as being a fork from Minix?

    I though that it started as a terminal emulator and that Linus had wanted to fork from Minix but couldn't for licensing reasons (and went on to have a big fight with Tanenbaum on UseNet over the portability of the Linux code).

  • Ken Thompson (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you want Ken Thompson to enjoy it, it should be made available in Microsoft Word format.

  • Not new (Score:1)

    by Tester ( 591 )
    This guy has been making his map for quite a while. I'd like to know if there is a book, preferably in a interesting style, that would relate the history of unix?
  • The DOS history is also missing all the other things that went into DOS/Windows over time. Like chunks of 'Stacker' and all the other 3rd party products that were bought out and assimiliated.

    How many other products that went into Windows can you name?

    --
    Simon

  • If you go to mckusick.com [mckusick.com], you can buy a 4 CD set containing all the original BSD src. However, you will need to have an ancient Unix source license, according to the web page. There's a link on how to get one listed on the web page.

  • I teach Computer Science 302, Unix System Administration at Washington State University, and my lecture on Unix history just got a whole lot easier.

    Tres cool!
  • The computer languages chart doesn't have nearly enough lines going into "Perl 1.0". :^)
  • ...he just says "I must say that I did not design Windows NT...

    What is he supposed to say? I did the whole thing? Even if he did it just wouldn't be very cool, a lot of people worked on the design of NT.

    Besides, he probably knew it would come back to haunt him ;)

  • Here are a couple of example for loops in bash:

    for f in foo bar baz; do
    echo $f;
    lpr $f;
    done

    or you can use backticks to generate your list (watch out for files with spaces in the names though...):

    for f in `find . -type f -name '*.ps' -print`; do
    echo $f;
    lpr $f;
    done

    Try reading up on bash functions if you want to do complicated things. The hyperlinked help you mention sounds nice, but I reckon bash is probably bloated enough already without all that extra gubbins in it. If you need to read a manual your shell script might be better written in something a little more legible and flexible -- like Perl, Python or whatever -- horses for courses and all that.
    --
  • Thats because OS/2 Ain't a unix....

    It cam out of IBM/MS's attempt to do the next windows after windows 3.0. they argued at NT came out from M$ and OS/2 from IBM.

  • Re:Huh? (Score:1)

    by jafac ( 1449 )
    He must be thinking of VMS. Microsoft hired some key VMS dude (okay, I forget his name, so sue me), from Digital, and he was like one of the chief architects of the NT kernel early on. I doubt if he would have approved of the changes since his tenure tho.

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
  • I have heard the story, but never seen it.

    It's interesting to see SunOS starting off as BSD-based, then being changed over to System V-based.

    But where is BeOS?

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!

  • That's funny, I always thought that was a Yankee joke! :-)


    -- OpenSourcerers [opensourcerers.com]
  • I worked on the AIX transition from 3.x -> 4.x. There is (were) no single line of code from SVR4 in the AIX kernel. In fact, AFAIR, the kernel was based on the SVR3.2, with extensions from IBM. Also, parts of AIX 3.x were in OSF/1 (another port that I worked on).
  • The Mach version that NextStep were based on were a monolithic kernel (whereby Mach and BSD were merged). Next didn't separate the BSD part from the Mach kernel (OSF RI later worked on this). The GUI libraries was definitely not *IX based, but the kernel were.
  • Hmm... I saw AIX, but no OS/2!
  • What about Proprietary Unixes... I'm thinking of one made by Altos in particular... I don't remember what they called it, but it ran on their own x86 based hardware (ie, not IBM-PC hardware, it just happened to use the same CPU)... I happen to have one of these boxes, and would be interested in the lineage of it's Unix...
  • I hate to say it, but you can tell it's Unix by the fonts. Why do Unix fonts have to look so awful? No website created by a Windows user would have fonts that unreadable unless they were deliberately creating a k-rad eyesore. (Of course if you use a Unix based web browser to view a website created on Windows the fonts may suck even if they look great on Windows.)

    PS. This is not a troll, it's an observation of the objective fact that Unix fonts suck.
  • Actually, the "HTML" version is just a series of GIFs. This isn't an HTML issue at all. The GIFs were presumably created using a graphing program. I can't remember the name, but I've used a program on Linux that could have generated those pictures, and I never got it to display anything where the fonts didn't look like crap.
  • Someone needs to license that from the author and make a nice poster out of it. It's pretty interesting data and shows the family trees well.
  • Sure, but we'd have to distribute the map.
    You take this corner, I'll take this corner....
  • The unix idea/mentality has been around for years. Yet no one person can say how it should be done. Hopefully in many years from now some great leader will unite the tribes of unix and make us whole(Yeah Right)
  • ... it'l be Microsofts 20th aniversary
    of doing the Xenix thing ?
  • I don't know about MIPS Unix, but the IBM RT (AIX) used a MIPS cpu. It was the first commercial RISC workstation, IIRC. It had an AT bus and the cpu had a heat sink. It was the first time I saw a cpu heat sink in workstation/PC. I believe that this was back in 1986.

    The old Apollo workstations initially ran DomainOS, then later had the option of using Unix. It was a version of BSD that they called Domain/IX.

  • Wow, I'm such a freaking pack rat. I found this file fragment in one of my archive directories. You had a choice of BSD or SYSV.

    $ install_sysadmin

    Software installation TYPES are:

    RESTART -- Restart the DOMAIN/IX software installation.
    DOMAIN_IX -- Install the full DOMAIN/IX software package.

    Please enter installation TYPE: domain_ix

    **** SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR ONLY INSTALLATION ****

    You must provide the name of the TARGET volume on which to
    install the software (e.g., //UPDATE_ME).

    Please enter TARGET Volume or type quit: //meow

    The DOMAIN/IX PRODUCT TYPES are:

    BSD4.2 -- Berkeley 4.2
    SYS5 -- System 5
    BOTH -- Berkeley 4.2 and System 5

    Please enter the PRODUCT TYPE you wish to install, or type quit: bsd4.2

    Hmmmm, I guess I was a BSD snob back then.:)
  • Well I spelled it MIPS, but I pronounce it romp.:) Thanks for the correction. BTW, that information page is pretty neat. I had no idea that ppl still had an interest in the RT. It's actually kind of scary.
  • Go to his site [wanadoo.fr] and you'll find one [wanadoo.fr].

    logan

  • and it also had BSD based sockets...

    earlier versions may be as bad as you say but from ns3.3 on, pretty much anything that would compile on any bsd4.2 would compile out of the box on a next box. NeXTSTEP was/is just as much unix as any version of linux say up to kernel 1.1 was.
    ---
    Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...
  • A handful of real-mode interrupts were still handed off to real-mode DOS as late as Windows 95 at least, but I don't have my copies of Unauthorized Windows 95 or Windows 95 System Programming Secrets anymore. I'm kind of curious to find out how many real-mode calls survived to Windows Me despite the MS hype...

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • Actually, no.

    Structurally, Windows took over more and more of the job of DOS, starting with Windows 3.0 Enhanced Mode. Win95's internals weren't a heck of a lot different than Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with 32-bit file access activated, although both used DOS for some low-level functions.

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • Eh, the DOS/Windows history could be a lot more complicated if they started with CP/M, and included the OS/2-Windows-Windows NT back-and-forth...

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • fork f-fork fork fork, Bill Joy fork!
  • Oh, but he's missing kernel 2.4 [kernel.org].
    Linux 2.4 was probably not included because a stable version does not yet exist.

    This is a great chart, though. Very interesting.

  • To me it looks like... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    a copy of the British Royal Family Tree.

    Unix the royal OS.

  • Cut my first OS-lovin' teeth on a Magnum pizzabox running MIPS Unix - man, those were glorious days. I'll never forget the smell of those Magnum pizzaboxes when we first unpacked 'em, set 'em up on a desk and plugged in a terminal ... what was it, 50 MIPS (software-MIPS/spec, not MIPS/cpu) or so?

    Back in those days, my 25mhz 386 was pretty dope, so having a Magnum pizzabox was delicious. I wasn't really a big fan of DOS (but *was* a big fan of DesqView running multiple DOS shells), so to have cranked up MIPS Unix and be given a Magnum box for my porting effort, that was a sweet, sweet day.

    Man, that's some serious nostalgia right there. Wonder if I can get a Magnum cheap somewhere these days, to go alongside my aging Indy collection...
  • Shouldn't the VIsual map mean that you can navigate it as text with the VIsual editor? What's this graphical stuff doing in a Unix page.

    Heresy! Burn them all! Force them to use Windows!

    On a more serious note, I *am* strongly skeptical about the credibility of a site that links to a Rhonda Hauben article.

    hawk
  • You mean the hurd?
    No ... the C compiler, libraries, editors, shells, system tools, graphical interface toolkits, and other material produced as parts of Project GNU, and which compose a far greater number of lines of code in most modern Linux-based systems than does the kernel.
  • And of course, there was Data General's DG/UX for the Motorola 88K series of RISC processors.

    Actually, these days it runs on Intel CPUs. Although they continue to maintain the m88k version, they haven't sold any 88k based machines for many years now. It's actually one of my favourite Unices. It sucked quite badly in early versions, but later ones are much better. Interestingly, it's the only Unix version I know of (other than Linux) that doesn't originate from "real" Unix. The kernel was rewritten from scratch to conform with the specs. It contains none of the original Unix code. The userland was all licensed from SVR4, though.

  • There are some good links to the original classic code, such as the first C compiler by Dennis Ritchie. Now all I need is the old vi editor code by Bill Joy and I'll be set!

    I'd give my left mouse button for a genuine compiled binary by Mr. Joy himself... :)
  • I thought NT had some Mach code in it - didn't see it in that map.

    Perhaps you were mistaken and it doesn't contain any Mach code.

  • but the IBM RT (AIX) used a MIPS cpu.

    You misspelled "ROMP". :-) The RT PC used the IBM-developed ROMP; see The IBM RT Information page [cmu.edu], and pages linked to it, such as the IBM RT system hardware FAQ [cmu.edu], which says:

    That's Research OPD Mini Processor. OPD = Office Products Division.

    ROMP was originally designed to be used in office products, primarily text editing systems such as the IBM Office System/6 and DisplayWriter. The architectural work started in late spring of 1977, as a spin-off of the T.J. Watson Research 801 work (hence the "Research" in the acronym). Most of the architectural changes were for "cost reductions," such as adding 16-bit instructions for "byte-efficiency"--a main concern at IBM at the time.

  • Microsoft hired some key VMS dude (okay, I forget his name, so sue me), from Digital, and he was like one of the chief architects of the NT kernel early on.

    Dave Cutler, as per this earlier posting of mine [slashdot.org].

  • I believe its based on the Prism kernel (?)

    And the evidence to support this belief is? (The fact that Cutler was one of the people working on that project - I seem to remember hearing that "Prism" was the name of the RISC architecture they were doing; I don't know whether the OS they were doing had the same name - doesn't ipso facto mean that the next OS he did included any code from that project. Ideas, maybe, but not necessarily code.)

  • No, the BeOS kernel is not UNIXy at all. If you read the FAQ at be.com (if it's still there--I haven't checked in a long time) they say something like the following: Although we admire some aspects of UNIX, we feel that an altogether new built-from-the-ground-up approach is necessary. To this end the BeOS kernel draws the best from other operating systems and incorporates completely new approaches to problems where necessary.
  • Well, it could be because Darwin draws on the FreeBSD community for some of the tools. We've actually had a smallish discussion about this on the GNUstep discussion list, and the project leader for Darwin said that the decision to use BSD tools rather than GNU tools was related to the requirements of the GPL.
  • I think it's mostly because Microsoft has enough money to pay professional type houses to produce top of the line typefaces. I mean, old Billy boy spared no expense when it came to getting good fonts. But that kinda describes the whole Microsoft process doesn't it?
  • Windows CE (WinCE) is actually a fork from NT, not from Windows '9x. It's portable, pure 32-bit, and Unicode-only (no ASCII), all of which definitely do NOT apply to '9x/ME.

  • I think the creator of the chart is well aware of what a "Unix system" really means. Most of the world accepts "Linux" to mean "complete systems using the Linux kernel", in the right context. This is no exception.

    Under your proposed definition, the chart is still wrong, as the dates given on the chart are not dates for releases of "complete systems using the Linux kernel". And surely you know that there are a number of contributors to the complete system that uses the Linux kernel that do object to use of the term "Linux" to describe the whole system, even if you think (as I do) that some like RMS carry it too far.

    There is no mention of Linus anywhere on the web page.

    Well, duh. There is more to a picture than the characters and lines on the page, there is also what is implied to an intelligent reader. Putting an event on the diagram marks it as significant; leaving an event off the diagram marks it as insignificant. The release dates of the various Linux kernels can be obtained from many sources; it would be nice to tell the story of the Linux distributions, as it is woefully under-publicized.

  • It's debatable what makes Linux Unix-like - certainly the kernel API was designed from the start to be Unix-like, and there are Unix-like tools from BSD and the X project in particular, so it's far from accurate to say that the GNU tools are what makes it Unix-like.

    I expect this will start another GNU/Linux flamefest :) It's clear that GNU has contributed massively to the typical Linux distro, I just wish they would not try to take *all* the credit...

  • I noticed that virtually none of the Digital UNIXes are on there. There's Digital Unix, the outgrowth of OSF, but nothing about Ultrix (unless I missed it). Hardly a fringe variant, Ultrix got as high as 4.0 and was on Vaxen, workstations, RISC workstations, all sorts of stuff. Being as how this is the UNIX I learned on, I'm kinda miffed to see it missing. :-(

    It's also interesting to note that, as recently as a few years ago, DEC was still using their standard character generator for their PCI-based Alpha machines -- now that's what a UNIX console is supposed to look like!

    -- Offtopic --

    The quote at the bottom, as I read this:

    We are sorry. We cannot complete your call as dialed. Please check the number and dial again or ask your operator for assistance. This is a recording.

    Reminds me of the time in school when I found a phone number that was one digit off from mine, but not currently in service. I recorded the intercept message, put it as my outgoing message, and added "but that's not my number, and I'm not here anyway." Best message I ever did, but really pissed off all my friends and family... :-)

  • I think they missed AIX/370 --> AIX/ESA. This was an extremely botched IBM port of AIX to the IBM 370 series mainframe processors. We tried it, but it made our mainframe run about as fast as a PC.

    This was around 1994. I don't know what it was derived from, but it was an extensive rewrite, and deserves its own breakout in the chart.

  • I notice that you have Win 3.1 as the direct ancestor of Win95, with DOS influencing.

    Shouldn't it be the other way around, given that the first version of Win95 was really just DOS with some 32 bit code, and a GUI totally unlike Win 3.1?

    At least it should be equal contrib...
  • I think it would be interesting if the thickness of each line represented the number of copies in use. This way you see which ones are really the "trunks" (like BSD and AT&T) and which are the twigs.
  • Well, it is not entirely correct. In fact, IRIX 6.3 was a fork that worked only on the 02. IRIX 6.4 was for the release of Origin 2000. IRIX 6.5 was the first all platform release since 6.2 and 6.2 was the first all platform release since 5.3.

    So IRIX did "evolve". Just on different platforms. And Linux is better tracked due to the open development method.

    If you look at the IRIX that was developed for the last two years for SN1 (O3000), it was done almost
    completely separate from mainstream IRIX 6.5 devolopment and then pulled back in (in an incredibly painstaking manner) to the mainstream 6.5 release for 6.5.9. You just don't know this happened because it was all inside of SGI.
  • The point of the picture is to show inheritance and it portrays Linux as being a standalone branch with no connection to what went before.

    Er, no. The diagram shows code forks. By and large, Linux systems incorporate little to no code from other Unix systems, largely because of the licensing issues. Perhaps there should be a dashed line from some of the BSDs, since there is some BSD code floating around in your average Linux distro, but by and large, Linux (for the obtuse: in this context, Linux == Linux kernel, GNU tools, some BSD tools, XFree, Perl, Python, KDE, etc., etc.) stands alone. Indeed, the line from Minix to Linux is incorrect.

    The kernel is just a tiny part of the OS...

    And, once again, I state: Most of the world accepts "Linux" to mean "complete systems using the Linux kernel". This diagram is no exception.
  • I saw one of these systems many years ago. It had an 8086 with custom MMU hardware. It ran Xenix.
  • I expected to see UNICOS in there somewhere, which is UNIX for the Cray.

    And I always wondered about those Unices that the Emacs and trn installers ask about... Venix, Eunice, etc.

    Also, isnt EROS a Unixish OS?


    --
  • The great grandaddy was totally left out. I thought all variations of *Unix* stemmed from the reasearch of Multics.
  • Speaking of odd Unix-ish operating systems, anybody remember OS-9 (not to be confused with Plan 9 or OS/2)? I didn't see it on the chart, but it may not have been Unixish enough to get on. It was originally developed on the 6809, a 8 bit microprocessor, and eventually ported to 68000. It was able to address something like a meg of RAM and I believe on the 68K it had virtual memory.

    The company I worked for back in '84 had one shipped to us for a month or so along with a pair of comically inept technicians in the hope we'd consider a port of our Unix software to it.

    It didn't seem so bad for a computer with limited resources; certainly it was miles ahead of the very early versions of DOS that were kicking around then. On the other hand, we had a sweet little 68K based Unix System III box from Plexus, that proved you could put a real operating system on a microcomputer.
  • Ok, first I thought this was a dumb idea. But then when I saw how many branches there were... unbelievable.

    I'd like to see a similar map for programming languages, although the few I saw back in school were pretty lacking, and some were big jumps.

    At least with Unix, it's easier to trace.

    Ever think that some day all the geneology map will be put together officially (by the government of course so that they could mess with your 'past', and prove Jefferson never committed adultery...) but a 3-d real time traversing of the world's geneology....

    Rader

  • Also, CP/M is not mentioned at all, which DOS was originally based on (named QDOS, not written by Microsoft, created according to the specs of a CP/M manual.)
  • Yet no one person can say how it should be done. Hopefully in many years from now some great leader will unite the tribes of unix and make us whole

    ...thus it came to pass that many varieties of machine did arise upon the land.

    And verily did the hackers become confused, for their servants now spoke dialects, numerous beyond counting, and what was said to one might not be understood by another, or might be misunderstood;

    And the hackers cried out for relief, saying "Let there be but one and only one operating system on every machine, that our lives may be easy and carefree!"

    And Eris Discordia heard their cries. And she did grin most wickedly. And she did whisper into the ear of Sir William of Gates, that he should steal the face of the golden Apples, and place it upon the body of the Devil's Operating System;

    And thus was THE ABOMINATION, W*ND*WS, brought forth upon the earth.

    And there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth amoung the hackers, who now realized that diversity, and even a certain amount of disorder, is healthy. And they fought mightily against the abomination.

    And Eris relented on the poor suckers, and allowed there to be GNU, and Linux, and the brethern BSD, and Darwin, and all manner of software which each might change to his or her own liking, in a manner most eristic. Or not. And it was good.

    Fnord.

  • Yes, among other things BeOS isn't multiuser. It has a POSIX layer, but then so does NT... NeXTStep/OpenStep/Mac OS X Server/Darwin/Mac OS X really are full BSD systems on top of Mach.
  • Pretty, isn't it.
    • It interesting to see how Linux progresses as compared to, say, Irix. Linux progresses, and each branch (from kernel 2.0 to 2.1) is the "new" Linux, with the old branch dying off, while Irix runs in a straight, continuous line.
    It'll be interesting to see how they continue - It looks like chunk by chunk Irix will be opensourced, and absorbed into Linux.

    You have to wonder whether IBM are ultimately planning the same fate for AIX.

    Oh, but he's missing kernel 2.4 [kernel.org].

    cheers,
    G

  • What would also be interesting, would be a map of OS programmers, so you could see where one OS leans on anothers design, if not it's source code.

    I think that Sun hired a load of the guys at Berkely, Bill Joy etc, who did a lot of the early work on UNIX.

    Also, didn't Micros~1 hire one of the key programmers on Mach to write the NT kernel?
  • Did IRIX really start as a fresh implementation as the chart describes? I thought it was based off the BSD releases, based on early data sheets I have on IRIX 3.x...

    --LP
  • I'm another developer on comp-hist, and we've begun to integrate this tree and a few others. If you've got interesting info, please drop us a line!

  • A/UX (Score:2)

    by taniwha ( 70410 )
    Mach (A/UX briefly so before getting BSDed)

    Actually A/UX was never Mach based - it came from another whole family tree that's missing from the chart - 'UniPlus' which was an early System 3/5/5r2/5r3 variant with BSD networking and utilities on top - A/UX came from the system 5r2 branch.

    UniSoft did over 100 ports of UniPlus to mostly 68k based platforms in the early to mid 80s.

  • When I first tried MS DOS 1.25 (1.24?), I was fiddling around with both it and Digital Research's CPM86. The only reason DOS got the nod was that the computer I bought had Perfect software bundled with it; Perfect Calc...Writer...and some other 'Perfect' programs. They weren't bad at the time, back in 1982.
  • GWBASIC

    Ah, I forgot about that one. I attempted to create a Zork-style game with it without docs, knowledge of arrays, or examples. Really fun to do. I think I spent more time on my Zork-like game then Zork itself!

    Unfortunately, because I didn't know what I was doing, when I added rooms the program grew exponentially.

  • but Steve Jobs picture and not Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman?

    Read all the way to the bottom.

    "You may be wondering "Why does Steve Jobs appear in this unix history?". Simply because he has made the best unix computer ever : a NeXTcube powered with NeXTSTEP operating system."

    Which seems reasonable, other than his odd misspelling of "G4 Cube powered with OS X operating system." :)
  • OS/2 tails off at 1.1, when most of the GUI work that influenced Windows was done afterwards.

    On top of that you have Microsoft's participation in the pre-divorce OS/2 2.0 project, and the direct connection between the "MS OS/2 3.0" project and Windows NT.

    Another major problem is that WinCE is not a variant of Windows 9x, but instead is based on an embedded version of NT. I suspect MS will resync CE and NT around about Whistler so that they can build .NET into your TV sets...
  • What we need is an illustrated version of this ...

    y'know, showing the evolutionary forms of Geeks. Primordial forms with slide rules and pocket protectors, later forms with their ponytails and nez pierce glasses. never mind the migration patterns of the tribes

  • CP/M is not mentioned at all...

    well, QDOS was written from scratch, though a goal was to mimic CP/M. DOS 2 added significant Unix functionality so Unix would have to be mentioned also. CP/M was modelled after the DEC OSes like RSX-11 and RT-11: anybody remember PIP? :)

    BTW, I thought of more of the DOS lineage that should have been included: Phar Lap DOS extenders, QEMM and 386Max... was TopView in there?

  • There should also be a parallel line with it graphing the amount of sweat on Uncle Bill's forehead.
  • How about a map tracing the derivations of internet file sharing software and the resulting lawsuits?

  • Visual map of Windows is HERE (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:09PM (#832595)
    Visual map of Windows History [wanadoo.fr]

  • an interesting contrast (Score:3)

    by mattdm ( 1931 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @04:16PM (#832596) Homepage
    Hah. Extremely different from the Open [sic] Group's conception of history [unix-systems.org].

    --

  • Re:Map this (Score:3)

    by Guy Harris ( 3803 ) <guy@alum.mit.edu> on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @03:18PM (#832597)
    I think that Sun hired a load of the guys at Berkely, Bill Joy etc, who did a lot of the early work on UNIX.

    I suppose being one of the four founders of Sun, as Bill was, could be read as being hired by Sun, in a sense. :-)

    However, I don't think any of the other core BSD guys were Sun employees - Kirk McKusick wasn't (I seem to remember he may have consulted at Sun, but he wasn't on the payroll), and neither was Sam Leffler (he went to SGI, not Sun); I forget whether Mike Karels was involved with 4BSD or 2BSD at that time Sun was founded - in any case, he also wasn't ever a Sun employee, as far as I know.

    Also, didn't Micros~1 hire one of the key programmers on Mach to write the NT kernel?

    They hired Rick Rashid for Microsoft Research, but that was, I think, well after NT was shipped. They may have hired other Mach people to work on NT, but I don't know of any myself, for what that's worth.

    They did hire a guy from Digital Equipment Corporation, Dave Cutler, to be one of the architects of NT (perhaps the chief architect, although in the foreword to the first edition of Inside Windows NT he just says "I must say that I did not design Windows NT -- I was merely one of the contributors to the design of the system.")

    The I/O subsystem of NT looks somewhat VMSish, but I suspect the VMS I/O subsystem looks somewhat RSX-11M-ish; I suspect Cutler was responsible for much of the design of all three I/O subsystems (which does not mean that he necessarily used any VMS code in NT, it may just mean he reused earlier ideas of his).

  • Re:Wow. I like it... (Score:3)

    by Sick Boy ( 5293 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:52PM (#832598) Homepage
    Am I the only one that thought about the southern joke "...his family tree doesn't fork"?
    --

  • What about GNU? (Score:3)

    by stevenj ( 9583 ) <stevenj&alum,mit,edu> on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @03:56PM (#832599) Homepage
    Linux came from Minix? Linus was certainly inspired by [luga.or.at] Minix, but the two don't share a line of code last I heard.

    The thing that makes Linux Unix-like (libc, shell tools, etcetera) is the GNU System [gnu.org], which was started in 1983, but doesn't appear anywhere in the chart.

  • two missining that I noticed (Score:3)

    by dutky ( 20510 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:58PM (#832600) Homepage Journal

    What about Coherent, a V7 clone for 8086/80286 from Mark Williams Corp. and QNX?

    I'm a bit suprised that these two are missing, but XINU has made it onto the chart, even though it doesn't show any actual inheritance from any unix strain (and rightly so: XINU's only relationship to unix, aside from the name, was entirely spiritual).

  • Details (Score:3)

    by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @05:56PM (#832601) Homepage Journal
    The picture is beautiful, but it repeats a common error.

    I think the creator of the chart is well aware of what a "Unix system" really means. Most of the world accepts "Linux" to mean "complete systems using the Linux kernel", in the right context. This is no exception.

    Drawing the picture this way gives too much credit to Linus Torvalds...

    There is no mention of Linus anywhere on the chart or the web page. Furthermore, the diagram itself is not, as near as I can tell, about giving credit for anything. It merely tracks code forks.

    The folks who gave you the hundred-odd programs required by Posix plus all the development tools, mainly the FSF and its army of volunteers and the folks at Cygnus...

    Your average Linux distro includes a number of utilities from the BSDs, as well. (Indeed, pretty much any Unix these days encorporates ideas, if not code, from BSD.)

    Even more important, the folks like Peter McDonald, Adam Richter, and Patrick Volkering...

    Indeed. I wonder if we should include people like ESR and companies like Red Hat, who have been largely responsible for bringing Free Software onto the corporate map?

    The picture can be fixed by removing the Linux kernels ... and replacing them with a diagram showing the early SLS, LGX, and Slackware releases ...

    That would not "fix" anything, only expand it. The "Linux" branch includes all of those implictly.

    I do think a diagram of the history of the Linux distros, in the same spirit as this one, is a cool idea, though.
  • Oddly... BASIC is not mentioned anythere there. Basic has evolved quite a bit from what it used to be..

  • There's more (Score:3)

    by sj12fn ( 81588 ) <scott@fenton.baltimore.md . u s> on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:02PM (#832603) Homepage
    Not only is there a Unix History tree, a friend of mine and I have been putting together a whole computer history tree. Check it out at comp-hist.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net].

  • Re:What about GNU? (Score:3)

    by FattMattP ( 86246 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @04:53PM (#832604) Homepage
    The thing that makes Linux Unix-like (libc, shell tools, etcetera) is the GNU System, which was started in 1983, but doesn't appear anywhere in the chart.
    Are you refering to HURD? If so, it branches off at page seven of the PDF right in the middle of the page.

  • IRIX (Score:3)

    by HypodermicEyes ( 154869 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:35PM (#832605)
    Fascinating map, I could spend hours just researching from it to find out what the actual relationships are (i.e. what portions of OS A were integrated into OS B)...
    One thing: IRIX is shown beginning around 1986 right out of the blue. According to SGI.com's section on IRIX, it was incepted in '82. I'm curious which it is, and whether it was derived or really conjured up from scratch.
    The only others that appear out of thin air (other than UNICS) are Minix, Xinu, and Mach (A/UX briefly so before getting BSDed). Does anyone know if IRIX, like these, was an original design? It's certainly unique in its own right.
    Also, did I miss UNICOS in there? As I understand it, it is a UNIX (looks like a duck, quacks like a duck) derived from SysV with some BSDisms thrown in... showed up in '85, I reckon.

  • Re:Windows History (Score:3)

    by Karmageddon ( 186836 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:52PM (#832606)
    the DOS and Windows history doesn't show DR DOS, nor Desqview, nor VisiOn, nor Novell Netware, nor the IBM OS/2 history...

    ... and especially, it doesn't show all the rebooting :)

  • outdated (Score:3)

    by bigsweatyballs ( 212748 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @04:00PM (#832607)
    What !?!?! No 2.4.0-test7/pre7???

    Those bastards!

  • They missed the part... (Score:3)

    by JohnTheFisherman ( 225485 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @03:06PM (#832608)
    ...where Unix stopped [slashdot.org] being an OS.

  • The Linux kernel != a Unix (like) distribution (Score:4)

    by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @04:00PM (#832609) Homepage

    The picture is beautiful, but it repeats a common error. Every Unix or Unix-like distribution listed in the picture consists not only of a kernel, but of hundreds of utilities (all the little programs that you can count on having in your /bin and /usr/bin directories). Drawing the picture this way gives too much credit to Linus Torvalds and too little to two other groups of heros:

    • The folks who gave you the hundred-odd programs required by Posix plus all the development tools, mainly the FSF and its army of volunteers and the folks at Cygnus, the first to demonstrate that you could run a company based on free software. (RMS is right to complain about lack of credit here).
    • Even more important, the folks like Peter McDonald, Adam Richter, and Patrick Volkering who demonstrated how to produce complete Linux distributions that mere mortals could use. (RMS would look better if he demanded more credit for these folks as well; the task of producing a complete, working distribution installable by non-experts is gigantic and neither RMS nor Torvalds had anything to do with it).

    The picture can be fixed by removing the Linux kernels (or at least putting in large asterisks making sure that these are kernels only) and replacing them with a diagram showing the early SLS, LGX, and Slackware releases, with the branching relationships showing how the later distributions depend on the earlier ones.

  • Thankfully it's not complete :) (Score:4)

    by adubey ( 82183 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:19PM (#832610)
    The authors leave out the hordes of lesser known Unicies. I'm sure the graph would be completely unreadable if any of these were included.

    Does anyone remember MIPS Unix? I'm not sure of it's origins, but I think MIPS made it before SGI bought them outright (although I think it was still maintained despite the fact SGI had their own version of Unix, IRIX).

    Or what about Amiga UNIX (Aka AMIX)? From what I remember, this was a straight port of V.5.

    And of course, there was Data General's DG/UX for the Motorola 88K series of RISC processors. And even Dell had their own Unix for a while. And this isn't counting all the versions of companies that went under, and all the tweaked versions used in academia...

    fork(), anyone?

  • Re:Map this (Score:4)

    by dagoalieman ( 198402 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:14PM (#832611) Homepage
    I'd like to see just a general OS tree... not even as specific as this one, but one that relates *nix, basic (apple and commodore versions...), even (grr) MS OSs... even if it leaves out several revisions and what not, I'm sure connections and relations would be very interesting..

  • Wow. I like it... (Score:5)

    by rho ( 6063 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:10PM (#832612) Journal

    ...especially the part where Minix is just coasting along, and then... "Look! that little line poking out. Whazzit say? Linux 0.0.1?"

    Kinda makes you proud.

    It interesting to see how Linux progresses as compared to, say, Irix. Linux progresses, and each branch (from kernel 2.0 to 2.1) is the "new" Linux, with the old branch dying off, while Irix runs in a straight, continuous line.

    Looks kinda Darwinian, in fact. If I may make a poor analogy, it's like the difference between balancing a pole on it's end, and balancing a tripod.

    I'm still scared of the person that took the time to put that together, though...

  • UNIX History Graphing Project (Score:5)

    by eMBee ( 27441 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:17PM (#832613) Homepage
    you may also want to check out the UNIX History Graphing Project [adfa.edu.au] which uses Graphviz [att.com] to create the graph from ascii data files. the advantage is, you can calculate the graph on your machine if you want and easely add data and thus contribute to the project.

    here is the source for the first linux kernels:
    linux0.1
    Name: Linux 0.1
    Date: 1991-09-17
    Reference: http://www.memalpha.cx/Linux/Kernel/Master.html
    Influenced by minix1.5.10

    linux0.2
    Name: Linux 0.3
    Date: 1991-10-05
    Reference: a printed calendar
    Successor to linux0.1

    greetings, eMBee.
    --

  • Windows History, and computer languages history (Score:5)

    by drivers ( 45076 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:14PM (#832614)
    Also very interesting, chart of the history of computer languages:
    http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/lang/ [wanadoo.fr]

    And not as complicated, history of DOS and Windows:
    http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/windows/ [wanadoo.fr]

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