wandazulu writes "Forty years ago this summer, Ken Thompson sat down and wrote a small operating system that would eventually be called Unix. An article at ComputerWorld describes the history, present, and future of what could arguably be called the most important operating system of them all. 'Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service). They had no desire to stick with any of the batch operating systems that predominated at the time, nor did they want to reinvent Multics, which they saw as grotesque and unwieldy. After batting around some ideas for a new system, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix, which the pair would continue to develop over the next several years with the help of colleagues Doug McIlroy, Joe Ossanna and Rudd Canaday.'"
It's the 40th anniversary of UNIX, and probably a day away from the 40th anniversary of the first time a more experienced user saw someone typing at the keyboard of a terminal connected to a UNIX box and thought with a knowing smile (as I did when I saw the find command above), "Oh, I'll bet that guy expects that command will do something different than what it will actually do." [ Optionally suffixed with the second thought, "This'll be fun to watch," or "ZOMG! NO!" in those cases where the mistakes are particularly awkward. ]
C'mon, you know you've thunk it when watching the less experienced and the preoccupied before. And if you're like most people, you've had the experience of wanting bash or ksh (or csh, so that the BSD guys feel loved) to be a DWIM shell (do-what-I-mean, as opposed to do-what-I-say).
And probably about one day and 5 minutes from the 40th anniversary of the first time two UNIX users discussed the finer points of quoting in shell commands.;-)
That'll fail to get a kid named "Joe Lawnmower" off your lawn, but will wipe out all lawnmowers and shoot all people named "Joe", including your grandfather.
Windows could take on board one thing from From Unix and be a much better product as a result: as David Korn (of ksh fame) says in TFA: "One of the hallmarks of Unix was that tools could be written, and better tools could replace them... It wasn't some monolith where you had to buy into everything; you could actually develop better versions.". Microsoft has a lot to learn. The progress from 1980's DOS to today's offering is pretty sad.
Is that so ? Then why does Mac OS, for example, take a step back when it want to suddenly comply with UNIX ? The philosophy may be there, but the institution's grip is still firm. This is no slap on Mac OS, mind you - anyone and everyone can be silly enough to take -n out of echo for the simple sake of complying with a piece of paper instead of going with the times.
Don't like it? Replace it with Front Row or something else.
Don't like your shell's interpretation of a POSIX command? Replace it with something else - 'printf' comes to mind.
There's no Apple-imposed barrier. POSIX -ne UNIX, and POSIX owes much of its shell syntax requirement to ksh interpretation (not pdksh, not tcsh, not bash, and not zsh).
It doesn't suddenly want to comply with UNIX (actually it is a certified UNIX since 10.5), but OS X is just todays version of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP which used to be BSD running on top of a Mac kernel. So that made it UN*X in the first place, since 1986.
Forget about Mac OS (sans X), that's a dead horse in many ways. What we are looking at now is NeXTSTEP with a different marketing name, which was better than Mac OS to begin with because SJ had the chance to avoid the stupid mistakes done with Mac OS, when he created NeXT
Windows could take on board one thing from From Unix and be a much better product as a result: as David Korn (of ksh fame) says in TFA: "One of the hallmarks of Unix was that tools could be written, and better tools could replace them... It wasn't some monolith where you had to buy into everything; you could actually develop better versions.". Microsoft has a lot to learn. The progress from 1980's DOS to today's offering is pretty sad.
Does Unix philosophy actually mesh with Unix reality? A reason I ask is because in unix everything is supposedly a file, but there were enough exceptions, such as in networking, that in the seperate Plan9 OS, they sought to really make everything a file. And that by the original makers of unix.
Did you notice that since Windows 3 Microsoft keeps adding Unix-like features? Windows 3 did not have _real_ multitasking, it came with WinNT. Windows NT was also a multi-user system, another Unix-like feature. With Windows Vista came the Windows power shell, M$ equivalent of Unix shell. In fact, Unix is an ideal, which Microsoft is approaching in each new Windows release.
On the other hand, Linux has been adding Windows-like features for the same period of time . . . like, say, GUIs, and drivers, and hardware acceleration, and programs that end-users want to use.
Not a bad retrospective, and interesting in that it illustrates some of the reasons for Unix's success: availability of source, and the ability for the user to create and replace tools easily. One wonders how those lessons might be applied not necessarily to operating systems or even computing, but to other industries and technical endeavours.
Not a bad retrospective, and interesting in that it illustrates some of the reasons for Unix's success: availability of source, and the ability for the user to create and replace tools easily.
Exactly. Unix has survived for as long as it has because it was built from, encouraged and profited from a culture of free innovation. Indeed, moreso that its actual code, I would argue that it is this culture that constitutes exactly what is meant by Unix.
Unix is not just an OS. It is a culture. Indeed, there is really no one "Unix" operating system. Or at least, no one widely used one called "Unix". Linux, BSD, OSX, BeOS, all can be called *nix systems. But what unifies them is not their internal mechanisms or algorithms or standards. What links them is the culture of the people who use them, and who build them. The idea of freely sharing tools, building on the work of others, understanding the whole of the machine, making magic happen with code; that is what Unix really is. You just don't see this kind of thinking in groups using other operating systems.
It's no surprise that the GPL and open source in general were born from the minds of Unix hackers. In many ways, the GPL only formalises the culture of academic openness, innovation and free sharing of ideas that existed throughout the Unix timeline. It's true that Unix was regarded by Big Corps as a money making excercise, but that's not how hackers saw it. They saw Unix and the programs that ran on it as part of their culture, and more importantly, heritage.
Unix has become more than source code or a framework. Is a significant part of our society. The norms and customs of Unix hackers have become their own tradition and even law in places. Unix and the hacker culture are a way our society has found to cope with the recent addition of computers, a way that has served well as the they and the internet become more and more pervasive. Like the old traditions and customs that founded our legal and civil systems, the Unix culture has formed the foundation of how we deal with the integration of computers into our lives.
The culture, traditions and ethics of Unix will probably outlast the lines of source that make up the programs, or the architectures they ran on. I expect Unix and hacker culture, or their descendants, will still be around in another 40 or 400 years, forming the philosophical foundation of a digital age.
I think that The Open Group [opengroup.org] would disagree with your overly broad definition of Unix
Then he needs to put a * in the right place; they can still whine about it [opengroup.org], but they can't pretend the notion to which "Un*x" or "Unix-like" refers doesn't exist.
sorry, you're the one living in fantasy land. The AT&T kind was mediocre, so Ken Thomspon and other hippies jazzed up the code (which was given to schools by at&t) with many improvements (32 bits, virtual memory, better tcpip) to make BSD. Later it was found in lawsuit against UCB that AT&T had incorporated (stolen) many BSD features into Unix. that was the hippie stuff, that made Unix good. So the BSD damn hippies wrote replacements for the AT&T things
It didn't matter if the UNIX you were running on was licensed from Sun, HP, or Dec. You could write your program for the UNIX API and move from one to another. That's WHY they failed, they were trying to establish proprietary lock-in on a platform that had openness built into the bones. The only proprietary operating system that has any market penetration now is one that refused to become another implementation of the hippie OS... Windows NT.
Not AT&T, not DEC, not HP, not IBM, none of them could keep the hippie OS from shining through. Those of us who were working in hippie OS land in the '70s and early '80s kept telling the squares that they couldn't keep the cats in the bag, and we were right.
Unix just turned 40, and Tetris just turned 25 [slashdot.org]. What do they have in common other than closely spaced birthdays? They were both first developed on PDP-11 hardware (Unix on a PDP-11, Tetris on a Russian clone). And they've both been cloned, early and often.
U.S. copyright explicitly doesn't apply to methods of operation. Title 17, United States Code, section 102(b) [bitlaw.com]. This makes it legal to "clone" a computer program by observing its method of operation. But SCO has tried to use copyright to shut down Unix clones, and The Tetris Company has tried to use copyright to shut down Tetris clones. SCO already lost its case (there is no copyrightable piece of Unix in Linux), but the other case (Tetris v. BioSocia) is still pending.
And despite Tetris inventor Alexey Pajitnov's expressed disdain for free software [slashdot.org], two servers operated by Tetris (zone.tetris.com and www.tetrisfriends.com) are run using GNU/Linux.
Actually SCO argued that UNIX-clones weren't clones at all, but were using the same C code. Sure, they were full of shit, but what they were claiming IBM had done actually would have been a violation of copyright law.
For those who haven't read it, this book is a GREAT read:
A quarter Century of Unix [amazon.com] by Peter H Salus
Highly recommended, and once you've read it you'll suddenly understand why a lot of stuff is the way it is. Hat's off to the Best. Operating System. Ever.
In honor of Unix's 40th anniversary, at 10:00 tonight there will be a celebratory Launching of the Chairs. It's open to the public, but seats are expected to go fast so you should plan to come early!
When I started doing Unix Admin professionally Unix was just turning 30, Linux was poised to take over the Desktop, Mac OS X was just a glimmer of hope, and Sun was the king of commercial Unix.
When I started using Minix, Unix was only 20, but RMS was kvetching about source code (and Hurd was Coming Soon), BSD had just won it's freedom, and Steve Jobs was doing cool things over at NeXT. Unix was just leaving it's First "Golden Age"...
Now, at 40, Mac OS X is the most used Unix system, Sun was just bought cheap, most other commercial Unix systems are defunct... But with Android, Pre, and iPhone all putting *nix systems in the palms of millions, Macs selling more than ever, and many companies offering Linux pre-installed in the box, Unix is as relevant as ever.
p.s. The term "GNU/Linux" wouldn't be so repulsive if there actually were a GNU system that Torvalds bastardized by swapping out a kernel. But there is no such beast because Hurd remains unfinished. RMS publicly called the kernel the simplest part of an operating system, yet they still have not finished it.
If you measure in terms of directly by consumers, yes. Also by number of machines, yes. OS X is the #1 selling Unix machine by number of units. By revenue, no.
What do you think it means? OS X is certified (by the Open Group) UNIX, and it owns 8% of the desktop market. That's a lot of UNIX machines. Yes, other UNIX OSes dominate on the server (where OS X has no foothold at all), but I doubt there are as many server machines as there are client machines in general.
Every generation has a mythology. Every millenium has a doomsday cult. Every legend gets the distortion knob wound up until the speaker melts. Archeologists at the University of Helsinki today uncovered what could be the earliest known writings from the Cult of Tux, a fanatical religious sect that flourished during the early Silicon Age, around the dawn of the third millenium AD...
The Gospel of Tux (v1.0)
In the beginning Turing created the Machine.
And the Machine was crufty and bogacious, existing in theory only. And von Neumann looked upon the Machine, and saw that it was crufty. He divided the Machine into two Abstractions, the Data and the Code, and yet the two were one Architecture. This is a great Mystery, and the beginning of wisdom.
And von Neumann spoke unto the Architecture, and blessed it, saying, "Go forth and replicate, freely exchanging data and code, and bring forth all manner of devices unto the earth." And it was so, and it was cool. The Architecture prospered and was implemented in hardware and software. And it brought forth many Systems unto the earth.
The first Systems were mighty giants; many great works of renown did they accomplish. Among them were Colossus, the codebreaker; ENIAC, the targeter; EDSAC and MULTIVAC and all manner of froody creatures ending in AC, the experimenters; and SAGE, the defender of the sky and father of all networks. These were the mighty giants of old, the first children of Turing, and their works are written in the Books of the Ancients. This was the First Age, the age of Lore.
Now the sons of Marketing looked upon the children of Turing, and saw that they were swift of mind and terse of name and had many great and baleful attributes. And they said unto themselves, "Let us go now and make us Corporations, to bind the Systems to our own use that they may bring us great fortune." With sweet words did they lure their customers, and with many chains did they bind the Systems, to fashion them after their own image. And the sons of Marketing fashioned themselves Suits to wear, the better to lure their customers, and wrote grave and perilous Licenses, the better to bind the Systems. And the sons of Marketing thus became known as Suits, despising and being despised by the true Engineers, the children of von Neumann.
And the Systems and their Corporations replicated and grew numerous upon the earth. In those days there were IBM and Digital, Burroughs and Honeywell, Unisys and Rand, and many others. And they each kept to their own System, hardware and software, and did not interchange, for their Licences forbade it. This was the Second Age, the age of Mainframes.
Now it came to pass that the spirits of Turing and von Neumann looked upon the earth and were displeased. The Systems and their Corporations had grown large and bulky, and Suits ruled over true Engineers. And the Customers groaned and cried loudly unto heaven, saying, "Oh that there would be created a System mighty in power, yet small in size, able to reach into the very home!" And the Engineers groaned and cried likewise, saying, "Oh, that a deliverer would arise to grant us freedom from these oppressing Suits and their grave and perilous Licences, and send us a System of our own, that we may hack therein!" And the spirits of Turing and von Neumann heard the cries and were moved, and said unto each other, "Let us go down and fabricate a Breakthrough, that these cries may be stilled."
And that day the spirits of Turing and von Neumann spake unto Moore of Intel, granting him insight and wisdom to understand the future. And Moore was with chip, and he brought forth the chip and named it 4004. And Moore did bless the Chip, saying, "Thou art a Breakthrough; with my own Corporation have I fabricated thee. Though thou art yet as small as a dust mote, yet shall thou grow and replicate unto the size of a mountain, and conquer all before thee. This blessing I give unto thee: every eighteen months shall thou double in capacity, until the end of the age." This is Moore's Law,
I've encountered bits and pieces of Unix hagiography for the last 15 years, and in all that time, I've internalized that "Multics sucks" (somewhere alongside the virgin birth), yet I can't bring to mind a single reason *why* Multics sucked. Were the Romans really so stupid as they are made out to be?
From Fernando J. Corbató's 1991 Turing lecture [mit.edu] concerning one of Muttlix's early teething problems:
The decision to use a compiler to implement the system software was a good one, but what we did not appreciate was that new language PL/I presented us with two big difficulties: First, the language had constructs in it which were intrinsically complicated, and it required a learning period on the part of system programmers to learn to avoid them; second, no one knew how to do a good job of implementing the compiler.
So, perhaps, not the best suited language for systems programming? From Wikipedia:
The goal of PL/I was to develop a single language usable for both business and scientific purposes.
Doesn't that vision give your average PHB a throbbing chum? If simplicity is hard, let's scale up the mediocre talent and do sameness instead.
PL/I was designed by a committee drawn from IBM programmers and users drawn from across the United States, working over several months.
No sociology experiment from the 1960s was complete without confederates in white shirts. The free-love hippies managed to sneak into the language promiscuous data type conversions.
PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
God, I love this guy. He's the patron saint of annoying the hell out of people by always being right, and putting a fine point on it. Same monograph includes another famous zinger:
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past.
To the person who actually modded this ^^^ +1 Informative: This was an extremely feeble attempt at +5 Funny. But thanks for reminding me that I am on Slashdot where mods can be fooled into anything. (*I know, I will go to hell for this...*)
I really, really want to say that Ken and Dennis invented C to make unix but I'm not completely sure. I could look it up, but I'm interested to hear what people have to say here. I mean, they're the K&R of the original C book, right?
No. The 'R' in "K&R" is indeed Dennis Ritchie, but the 'K' is Brian Kernighan.
'I really, really want to say that Ken and Dennis invented C to make unix but I'm not completely sure. I could look it up, but I'm interested to hear what people have to say here'
'Dennis and I [Thompson] were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C.'
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday June 07, @02:50PM (#28243563)
Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C.'
I cannot believe Ken Thompson wrote this nonsense.
B was derived from BCPL, which was a simplified version of the CPL language, designed at Cambridge and London Universities in the mid-60s. It was too complex to implement at that time, hence BCPL (Basic CPL).
B was very much like BCPL except that it used { } to define blocks, instead of (* and *).
AND, the original article (and the one above) promulgate the canard that Multics was unsuccessful and unwieldy.
In terms of influence on other OS's Multics was probably THE most important OS in history.
And an absolute joy to work with. Hence the original intention of Unics (the original spelling) to be cryptic and confusing - the exact OPPOSITE of Multics.
The first Unix was written in PDP-7 assembly. A "port" to PDP-11 involved a rewrite in PDP-11 assembly, and AFAIR the second or third (or fourth?) edition was the one to be the first that was written in a high-level, portable language (B or C? Can't remember). One thing I remember for sure is that early Unix has been rewritten several times.
Not exactly. RTFA. Unix was originally written in assembler on a PDP-7 in 1969. Thompson developed B, and some Unix development continued using B on the PDP-7. Ritchie developed a successor, C, finishing in 1972; in 1973 Thompson ported most of the Unix kernel to C on a PDP-11.
So C wasn't developed to "create" Unix; Unix was a precursor. C was indeed designed for implementing system software though.
Brian Kernighan -- the K of K&R got involved in C development later, and was indeed one of the two authors of the seminal K&R.
It's a load of horseshit, as Linus has repeatedly explained. Linux is not based on Minix. The architecture of the two kernels is completely dissimilar, and Linus has many times made his feelings known about what he thinks of microkernels.
And to celebrate, it issued the command: (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command: (Score:4, Insightful)
C'mon, you know you've thunk it when watching the less experienced and the preoccupied before. And if you're like most people, you've had the experience of wanting bash or ksh (or csh, so that the BSD guys feel loved) to be a DWIM shell (do-what-I-mean, as opposed to do-what-I-say).
And probably about one day and 5 minutes from the 40th anniversary of the first time two UNIX users discussed the finer points of quoting in shell commands. ;-)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
find: my_lawn: Permission denied
>>>You're too late old man. It's Our lawn now. ;)
mv /home/old_folks /retirement_home/
Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command: (Score:5, Interesting)
Bah. Your command would fail. You need to escape the splat just like the semicolon:
find my_lawn -name kids\* -exec rm -f {} \;
However -exec is slow. Try:
find my_lawn -name kids\* | xargs rm -rvf
Verbose for your kid-removing satisfaction.
Oh, and happy birthday, UNIX! Without you my career would have undoubtedly been less interesting.
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Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command: (Score:5, Funny)
Without UNIX we wouldn't have:
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
find my_lawn -name kids\* | xargs rm -rvf
That'll fail to get a kid named "Joe Lawnmower" off your lawn, but will wipe out all lawnmowers and shoot all people named "Joe", including your grandfather.
Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command: (Score:5, Funny)
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Unix is over the hill (Score:4, Funny)
We need a fresh new operating system like Windows 7.
Re:Unix is over the hill (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Unix is over the hill (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that so ? Then why does Mac OS, for example, take a step back when it want to suddenly comply with UNIX ? The philosophy may be there, but the institution's grip is still firm. This is no slap on Mac OS, mind you - anyone and everyone can be silly enough to take -n out of echo for the simple sake of complying with a piece of paper instead of going with the times.
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echo is a shell builtin, and the Finder.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Finder is just another app.
Don't like it? Replace it with Front Row or something else.
Don't like your shell's interpretation of a POSIX command? Replace it with something else - 'printf' comes to mind.
There's no Apple-imposed barrier. POSIX -ne UNIX, and POSIX owes much of its shell syntax requirement to ksh interpretation (not pdksh, not tcsh, not bash, and not zsh).
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Re:Unix is over the hill (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Unix is over the hill (Score:5, Interesting)
Does Unix philosophy actually mesh with Unix reality? A reason I ask is because in unix everything is supposedly a file, but there were enough exceptions, such as in networking, that in the seperate Plan9 OS, they sought to really make everything a file. And that by the original makers of unix.
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Windows has more and more Unix features (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Windows has more and more Unix features (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, Linux has been adding Windows-like features for the same period of time . . . like, say, GUIs, and drivers, and hardware acceleration, and programs that end-users want to use.
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Worth thinking about (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a bad retrospective, and interesting in that it illustrates some of the reasons for Unix's success: availability of source, and the ability for the user to create and replace tools easily. One wonders how those lessons might be applied not necessarily to operating systems or even computing, but to other industries and technical endeavours.
Re:Worth thinking about (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. Unix has survived for as long as it has because it was built from, encouraged and profited from a culture of free innovation. Indeed, moreso that its actual code, I would argue that it is this culture that constitutes exactly what is meant by Unix.
Unix is not just an OS. It is a culture. Indeed, there is really no one "Unix" operating system. Or at least, no one widely used one called "Unix". Linux, BSD, OSX, BeOS, all can be called *nix systems. But what unifies them is not their internal mechanisms or algorithms or standards. What links them is the culture of the people who use them, and who build them. The idea of freely sharing tools, building on the work of others, understanding the whole of the machine, making magic happen with code; that is what Unix really is. You just don't see this kind of thinking in groups using other operating systems.
It's no surprise that the GPL and open source in general were born from the minds of Unix hackers. In many ways, the GPL only formalises the culture of academic openness, innovation and free sharing of ideas that existed throughout the Unix timeline. It's true that Unix was regarded by Big Corps as a money making excercise, but that's not how hackers saw it. They saw Unix and the programs that ran on it as part of their culture, and more importantly, heritage.
Unix has become more than source code or a framework. Is a significant part of our society. The norms and customs of Unix hackers have become their own tradition and even law in places. Unix and the hacker culture are a way our society has found to cope with the recent addition of computers, a way that has served well as the they and the internet become more and more pervasive. Like the old traditions and customs that founded our legal and civil systems, the Unix culture has formed the foundation of how we deal with the integration of computers into our lives.
The culture, traditions and ethics of Unix will probably outlast the lines of source that make up the programs, or the architectures they ran on. I expect Unix and hacker culture, or their descendants, will still be around in another 40 or 400 years, forming the philosophical foundation of a digital age.
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Re:Worth thinking about (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that The Open Group [opengroup.org] would disagree with your overly broad definition of Unix
Then he needs to put a * in the right place; they can still whine about it [opengroup.org], but they can't pretend the notion to which "Un*x" or "Unix-like" refers doesn't exist.
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Re:Worth thinking about (Score:4, Informative)
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The importance of Open Systems. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're the revisionist.
It didn't matter if the UNIX you were running on was licensed from Sun, HP, or Dec. You could write your program for the UNIX API and move from one to another. That's WHY they failed, they were trying to establish proprietary lock-in on a platform that had openness built into the bones. The only proprietary operating system that has any market penetration now is one that refused to become another implementation of the hippie OS... Windows NT.
Not AT&T, not DEC, not HP, not IBM, none of them could keep the hippie OS from shining through. Those of us who were working in hippie OS land in the '70s and early '80s kept telling the squares that they couldn't keep the cats in the bag, and we were right.
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This makes Unix 15 years older than Tetris (Score:5, Interesting)
Unix just turned 40, and Tetris just turned 25 [slashdot.org]. What do they have in common other than closely spaced birthdays? They were both first developed on PDP-11 hardware (Unix on a PDP-11, Tetris on a Russian clone). And they've both been cloned, early and often.
U.S. copyright explicitly doesn't apply to methods of operation. Title 17, United States Code, section 102(b) [bitlaw.com]. This makes it legal to "clone" a computer program by observing its method of operation. But SCO has tried to use copyright to shut down Unix clones, and The Tetris Company has tried to use copyright to shut down Tetris clones. SCO already lost its case (there is no copyrightable piece of Unix in Linux), but the other case (Tetris v. BioSocia) is still pending.
And despite Tetris inventor Alexey Pajitnov's expressed disdain for free software [slashdot.org], two servers operated by Tetris (zone.tetris.com and www.tetrisfriends.com) are run using GNU/Linux.
Re:This makes Unix 15 years older than Tetris (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually SCO argued that UNIX-clones weren't clones at all, but were using the same C code. Sure, they were full of shit, but what they were claiming IBM had done actually would have been a violation of copyright law.
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You are correct (Score:4, Informative)
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A Quarter Century of Unix, the Book (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile, in Redmond (Score:3, Funny)
In honor of Unix's 40th anniversary, at 10:00 tonight there will be a celebratory Launching of the Chairs. It's open to the public, but seats are expected to go fast so you should plan to come early!
An alternate point of view (Score:5, Funny)
http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf [mit.edu]
"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix.
I don't think that is a coincidence."
Re:An alternate point of view (Score:4, Funny)
http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf [mit.edu]
"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that is a coincidence."
Neither of them were, of course, invented at Berkeley; one might, at best, argue that Berkeley perfected both of them. :-)
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40 and still relevant (Score:5, Interesting)
When I started doing Unix Admin professionally Unix was just turning 30, Linux was poised to take over the Desktop, Mac OS X was just a glimmer of hope, and Sun was the king of commercial Unix.
When I started using Minix, Unix was only 20, but RMS was kvetching about source code (and Hurd was Coming Soon), BSD had just won it's freedom, and Steve Jobs was doing cool things over at NeXT. Unix was just leaving it's First "Golden Age"...
Now, at 40, Mac OS X is the most used Unix system, Sun was just bought cheap, most other commercial Unix systems are defunct... But with Android, Pre, and iPhone all putting *nix systems in the palms of millions, Macs selling more than ever, and many companies offering Linux pre-installed in the box, Unix is as relevant as ever.
Re:40 and still relevant (Score:5, Funny)
...and Hurd is still "coming soon".
p.s. The term "GNU/Linux" wouldn't be so repulsive if there actually were a GNU system that Torvalds bastardized by swapping out a kernel. But there is no such beast because Hurd remains unfinished. RMS publicly called the kernel the simplest part of an operating system, yet they still have not finished it.
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Re:40 and still relevant (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:40 and still relevant (Score:5, Informative)
What do you think it means? OS X is certified (by the Open Group) UNIX, and it owns 8% of the desktop market. That's a lot of UNIX machines. Yes, other UNIX OSes dominate on the server (where OS X has no foothold at all), but I doubt there are as many server machines as there are client machines in general.
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The Gospel of Tux (Score:5, Funny)
Every generation has a mythology. Every millenium has a doomsday cult. Every legend gets the distortion knob wound up until the speaker melts. Archeologists at the University of Helsinki today uncovered what could be the earliest known writings from the Cult of Tux, a fanatical religious sect that flourished during the early Silicon Age, around the dawn of the third millenium AD...
The Gospel of Tux (v1.0)
In the beginning Turing created the Machine.
And the Machine was crufty and bogacious, existing in theory only. And von Neumann looked upon the Machine, and saw that it was crufty. He divided the Machine into two Abstractions, the Data and the Code, and yet the two were one Architecture. This is a great Mystery, and the beginning of wisdom.
And von Neumann spoke unto the Architecture, and blessed it, saying, "Go forth and replicate, freely exchanging data and code, and bring forth all manner of devices unto the earth." And it was so, and it was cool. The Architecture prospered and was implemented in hardware and software. And it brought forth many Systems unto the earth.
The first Systems were mighty giants; many great works of renown did they accomplish. Among them were Colossus, the codebreaker; ENIAC, the targeter; EDSAC and MULTIVAC and all manner of froody creatures ending in AC, the experimenters; and SAGE, the defender of the sky and father of all networks. These were the mighty giants of old, the first children of Turing, and their works are written in the Books of the Ancients. This was the First Age, the age of Lore.
Now the sons of Marketing looked upon the children of Turing, and saw that they were swift of mind and terse of name and had many great and baleful attributes. And they said unto themselves, "Let us go now and make us Corporations, to bind the Systems to our own use that they may bring us great fortune." With sweet words did they lure their customers, and with many chains did they bind the Systems, to fashion them after their own image. And the sons of Marketing fashioned themselves Suits to wear, the better to lure their customers, and wrote grave and perilous Licenses, the better to bind the Systems. And the sons of Marketing thus became known as Suits, despising and being despised by the true Engineers, the children of von Neumann.
And the Systems and their Corporations replicated and grew numerous upon the earth. In those days there were IBM and Digital, Burroughs and Honeywell, Unisys and Rand, and many others. And they each kept to their own System, hardware and software, and did not interchange, for their Licences forbade it. This was the Second Age, the age of Mainframes.
Now it came to pass that the spirits of Turing and von Neumann looked upon the earth and were displeased. The Systems and their Corporations had grown large and bulky, and Suits ruled over true Engineers. And the Customers groaned and cried loudly unto heaven, saying, "Oh that there would be created a System mighty in power, yet small in size, able to reach into the very home!" And the Engineers groaned and cried likewise, saying, "Oh, that a deliverer would arise to grant us freedom from these oppressing Suits and their grave and perilous Licences, and send us a System of our own, that we may hack therein!" And the spirits of Turing and von Neumann heard the cries and were moved, and said unto each other, "Let us go down and fabricate a Breakthrough, that these cries may be stilled."
And that day the spirits of Turing and von Neumann spake unto Moore of Intel, granting him insight and wisdom to understand the future. And Moore was with chip, and he brought forth the chip and named it 4004. And Moore did bless the Chip, saying, "Thou art a Breakthrough; with my own Corporation have I fabricated thee. Though thou art yet as small as a dust mote, yet shall thou grow and replicate unto the size of a mountain, and conquer all before thee. This blessing I give unto thee: every eighteen months shall thou double in capacity, until the end of the age." This is Moore's Law,
Eunuchs (Score:5, Funny)
Eunuchs® is a trademark of Ball Labs.
let there be pipes (Score:4, Interesting)
I've encountered bits and pieces of Unix hagiography for the last 15 years, and in all that time, I've internalized that "Multics sucks" (somewhere alongside the virgin birth), yet I can't bring to mind a single reason *why* Multics sucked. Were the Romans really so stupid as they are made out to be?
From Fernando J. Corbató's 1991 Turing lecture [mit.edu] concerning one of Muttlix's early teething problems:
The decision to use a compiler to implement the system software was a good one, but what we did not appreciate was that new language PL/I presented us with two big difficulties: First, the language had constructs in it which were intrinsically complicated, and it required a learning period on the part of system programmers to learn to avoid them; second, no one knew how to do a good job of implementing the compiler.
So, perhaps, not the best suited language for systems programming?
From Wikipedia:
The goal of PL/I was to develop a single language usable for both business and scientific purposes.
Doesn't that vision give your average PHB a throbbing chum? If simplicity is hard, let's scale up the mediocre talent and do sameness instead.
PL/I was designed by a committee drawn from IBM programmers and users drawn from across the United States, working over several months.
No sociology experiment from the 1960s was complete without confederates in white shirts. The free-love hippies managed to sneak into the language promiscuous data type conversions.
Dijkstra summed it up in 1975 with his monograph
How do we tell truths that might hurt? [virginia.edu]
PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
God, I love this guy. He's the patron saint of annoying the hell out of people by always being right, and putting a fine point on it. Same monograph includes another famous zinger:
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past.
From Myths about Multics [multicians.org]
We wrote 3000 pages of the Multics System Programmer's Manual first, while waiting for the PL/I compiler.
That should strike a painful nerve in anyone who tried to adopt the C++ STL in 1994.
Ouch. Shipwrecked on the beach of half a programming language, fondling your monads.
Not half surprising that Thompson ended up carving his own canoe with a pen knife to escape.
UNIX! (Score:5, Funny)
eventually Unix begat OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
because in the end it was easier to make Unix user friendly than it was to to fix Windows :)
An old joke but it had to be said.
Re:Did they invent C too? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Did they invent C too? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Did they invent C too? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Did they invent C too? (Score:5, Informative)
I really, really want to say that Ken and Dennis invented C to make unix but I'm not completely sure. I could look it up, but I'm interested to hear what people have to say here. I mean, they're the K&R of the original C book, right?
No. The 'R' in "K&R" is indeed Dennis Ritchie, but the 'K' is Brian Kernighan.
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Re:Did they invent C too? (Score:5, Funny)
'I really, really want to say that Ken and Dennis invented C to make unix but I'm not completely sure. I could look it up, but I'm interested to hear what people have to say here'
For the definitive account, see:
http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/2U20.html [galactic-guide.com]
'Dennis and I [Thompson] were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C.'
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Re:Did they invent C too? (Score:4, Insightful)
Informative? WTF? The moderators are once again smoking crack...
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Re:Did they invent C too? (Score:4, Informative)
Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C.'
I cannot believe Ken Thompson wrote this nonsense.
B was derived from BCPL, which was a simplified version of the CPL language, designed at Cambridge and London Universities in the mid-60s. It was too complex to implement at that time, hence BCPL (Basic CPL).
B was very much like BCPL except that it used { } to define blocks, instead of (* and *).
AND, the original article (and the one above) promulgate the canard that Multics was unsuccessful and unwieldy.
In terms of influence on other OS's Multics was probably THE most important OS in history.
And an absolute joy to work with. Hence the original intention of Unics (the original spelling) to be cryptic and confusing - the exact OPPOSITE of Multics.
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Re:Did they invent C too? (Score:4, Informative)
Not exactly. RTFA. Unix was originally written in assembler on a PDP-7 in 1969. Thompson developed B, and some Unix development continued using B on the PDP-7. Ritchie developed a successor, C, finishing in 1972; in 1973 Thompson ported most of the Unix kernel to C on a PDP-11.
So C wasn't developed to "create" Unix; Unix was a precursor. C was indeed designed for implementing system software though.
Brian Kernighan -- the K of K&R got involved in C development later, and was indeed one of the two authors of the seminal K&R.
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Correction (Score:5, Funny)
Multics was believed to have stood for "Many Unnecessarily Large Tables In Core Simultaneously".
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Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:exaggeration about Minix... (Score:5, Informative)
It's a load of horseshit, as Linus has repeatedly explained. Linux is not based on Minix. The architecture of the two kernels is completely dissimilar, and Linus has many times made his feelings known about what he thinks of microkernels.
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