Unix Turns 40

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 'Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service).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.'"

But life is just getting started...

[The Pirou]

40 is the new 30!

Re:Did they invent C too?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Yesss. (Expecting +5 Informative!)

Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command:

[MrMr]

I think you meant "kids*"

A Quarter Century of Unix, the Book

[Fished]

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.

Re:Did they invent C too?

[iggymanz]

Ritchie invented C, it's funny that Ken worked on B with some help from Ritchie, C was the successor to B

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but point out the obvious here, but Android is based upon linux.

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to feed a troll, but in case you are as ignorant as you sound. Android uses the Linux kernel so Linus, et al. will most certainly not be out-of-work as you say. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) [wikipedia.org]

Re:Did they invent C too?

[osu-neko]

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.

Re:exaggeration about Minix...

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Did they invent C too?

[harry666t]

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.

Re:Did they invent C too?

[Holmwood]

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.

Re:40 and still relevant

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Re:40 and still relevant

[mario_grgic]

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.

Re:Did they invent C too?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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...*)

Re:40 and still relevant

[krisbrowne42]

Let's answer two ways that could be taken... No, I didn't mean Mac OS X is 40, my grammar radar missed that possible interpretation. (Though being a hereditary Unix through NeXT, BSD4.4 and back, it could be considered such)

By any measure I have seen in the past 5 years, Mac OS X continually shows market penetration 5-8+ times that of Linux, compared to which any other Unix system usage can mostly be considered statistical noise.

That's not to say they don't have relevance or followers, but when it comes to getting the average user putting their hands on a Unix or Unix-like system, no other compares to Mac OS X, and that's not even counting embedded usage like the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Re:This makes Unix 15 years older than Tetris

[darkjedi521]

I belive Unix was first developed on a PDP-7 as PDP-11s did not yet exist in 1969.

Re:Did they invent C too?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Worth thinking about

[Anonymous Coward]

-1, lives in hippie fantasy land.

I think you're forgetting that people had to pay AT&T, a bigger monopoly in its time than IBM and Microsoft combined, for a Unix source license and that they would to Very Bad Things to you if you broke that license. You're also forgetting Sun, HP, DEC, Apollo, and a host of other Unix vendors who were not at all about sharing freely or cooperating. (Granted, they're all dead now or nearly so.)

Your words are poetic but largely revisionist bullshit.

Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command:

[Wodin]

Bah. Your command would fail. You need to escape the splat just like the semicolon:

Not necessarily. It depends on whether there are files/directories in the current directory that start with the string "kids" (and your shell's globbing rules). If there aren't, then everything works find. If there's only one, things might seem to work, but files/directories in subdirectories will not be found (and therefore removed).

find my_lawn -name kids\* | xargs rm -rvf

Which will break if you have spaces or tabs or newlines etc. in your filenames. Use this instead (I hope you have a reasonable version of find and xargs):

find my_lawn -name kids\* -print0 | xargs -0 -r rm -rvf

Re:What came before?

[cptnapalm]

UNIX was the first portable operating system. Previous operating systems were done in assembly (as was the original PDP-7 version of UNIX {or UNICS, to be precise}). In order to do that, a new language was needed. So UNIX begat C.

Pipes, pumping output from one program into another program, comes from UNIX.

Not pretending to know better than the user what the user wants. That's why a ls -a in the home directory gives newbies heart attacks :)

The open nature of UNIX development let the guys at UCB make BSD and make all kinds of new stuff, demonstrating that open source could be a big win for innovation.

UNIX is older than me by a few years, but this is just stuff that I've learned over the years.

Re:Wow!

[dmsuperman]

Not only that but Linux != Unix, not really sure how that conclusion can be drawn :-/

Re:Worth thinking about

[Vanders]

It's no surprise that the GPL and open source in general were born from the minds of Unix hackers.

RMS had never even used UNIX when he started the GNU project: he was an ITS & Lisp hacker.

Re:Worth thinking about

[iggymanz]

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

You are correct

[toby]

As described in Dennis Ritchie's The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System [bell-labs.com].

Re:glad GNU/Linux & BSD have stolen Unix(tm) t

[tbuskey]

SunOS stopped including one by default. You had to purchase it. Solaris has always been that way (IIRC) until SunStudio 11 was made available for free. HP-UX stopped with version 9.x.

Luckily, gcc was good enough by this time and you could obtain it at a reasonable price from the FSF.

Linux and the BSDs came out and started getting good enough to displace the other OSen.

Re:Windows has more and more Unix features

[Mr Z]

And don't forget directories separated by slashes. They would have used forward slashes, except that they had already used forward slashes for flags (inherited from VMS by way of CP/M). And there were pipes, and redirection... Apparently one of the targets for MS-DOS 3.3 was to be compatible with MS's XENIX, with the eventual goal of switching everything over to XENIX. At least, I seem to recall reading that somewhere (Undocumented DOS, perhaps?). Lots of XENIX fun here. [softpanorama.org]

Re:Windows has more and more Unix features

[Anonymous Coward]

There were several bad habits that Seattle Computing retained from CP/M; many of these bad habits came in turn from DEC operating systems. The very worst of them was the CRLF convention for ending lines. Another one, not so problematic in itself, was the convention of marking command switches with slashes instead of hyphens.

MS-DOS did not pick up its Unix-like features until version 2. Did Microsoft get it right? No! They retained / as a switch character and gave us the brain-dead convention of using a backslash as a path separator. They kept the two-byte line-ending convention. Even though they made it so that you could access the device files with names like \dev\con, you still couldn't use con, aux, lpt1, and prn as the names of normal files.

They have a talent for retaining the wrong things and adding more bad things to the bad things they already have. Look at Windows registry files: UTF-16 (not UTF-8) encoding, escaped backslashes in directory names, and CRLF's for line endings.

Forty years of Unix and less garbage than 29 years of Windows.

Alice in UNIXland (Re:Worth thinking about)

[Anonymous Coward]

Good grief, what a load of nonsense. May I refer you to the original Alice in UNIXland? Just as accurate today as is was two decades ago; all that it would take to update it is to substitute in a few names.

<elided>

Soon Alice came upon a large brown table. The Consultant was there, as was an apparently Mad Hacker, and several creatures that Alice did not recognize. In one corner sat a Dormouse fast asleep. Over the table was a large sign that read "UNIX Conference."

Everyone except the Dormouse was holding a paper cup, from which they were sampling what appeared to be custard. "Wrong flavor," they all declared as they passed the cup to the creature on their right
and graciously took the one being offered on their left. Alice watched them repeat this ritual three or four times before she approached and sat down.

Immediately, a large toad leaped into her lap and looked at her as if it wanted to be loved.
"Grep," it exclaimed.

"Don't mind him," explained the Mad Hacker. "He's just looking for some string."

"Nroff?" asked the Frog.

The Mad Hacker handed Alice a cup of custard-like substance and a spoon. "Here," he said, "what do you think of this?"

"It looks lovely," said Alice, "very sweet." She tried a spoonful. "Yuck!" she cried. "It's awful. What is it?"

"Oh just another graphic interface for UNIX," answered the Hacker.

Alice pointed to the sleeping Dormouse. "Who's he?" she asked.

"That's OS Too," explained the Hacker. "We've pretty much given up on waking him.

Just then, a large, Blue Elephant sitting next to the Dormouse stood up. "Ladies and gentlemen," he trumpeted pompously, "as the largest creature here, I feel impelled to state that we must take an Open Look at..."

A young Job Sparrow on the other side of the table stood up angrily. The Elephant noticed and changed his speech accordingly. "...what our NextStep will be."

"Half the creatures bowed in respect while the other half snickered quietly to themselves. Just then, OS Too fell over in his sleep, crashing into the Elephant and taking him down with him. No one seemed
a bit surprised.

"What we need," declared a Sun Bear as he lapped up custard with his long tongue," is a flavor that goes down like the Macintosh.

"Suddenly, the White Consultant began jumping up and down as his face got red. "No, no, no! he screamed. "No one pays one fifty an hour to Macintosh consultants!"

"Awk," said the Frog.

"Users," explained the Sun Bear, "want an easy interface that they will not have to learn."

"Users?" cried the Consultant in disbelief. "Users?! You mean secretaries, accountants, architects. Manual laborers!"

"Well," responded the Sun Bear, "we've got to do something to make them want to switch to UNIX."

"Do you think," said a Woodpecker who had been busy making a hole in the table, "that there might be a problem with the name `UNIX?' I mean, it does sort of suggest being less than a man."

"Maybe we should try another name, " suggested the Job Sparrow, "like Brut, or Rambo."

"Penix," suggested a Penguin.

"Mount," said the Frog, "spawn."

Alice slapped him. "Nice?" he asked.

"But then again," suggested the Woodpecker, "what about the shrinkwrap issue?"

Suddenly, everyone leaped up and started dashing about, waving their hands in the air and screaming. Just as suddenly, they all sat down again.

"Now that that's settled," said the Woodpecker, "let's go back to tasting flavors."

Everyone at the table sampled a new cup of custard. "Wrong flavor," they all declared as they passed the cup to the creature on their right and took the one being offered on their left.

Totally confused, Alice got up and left. After she had been walking away, she heard a familiar voice behind her.

"Rem," it said, "edlin."

Alice turned and saw the Frog. She smiled. "Those are queer sounding words," she said, "but at least I know what they mean."

"Chkdsk," said the Frog.

Re:Wow!

[nausea_malvarma]

GNU's not Unix, you insensitive clod!

Re:Windows has more and more Unix features

[Philip_the_physicist]

That is unsurprising, given that *nix is generally held to be the best OS family for most tasks, with there only being doubt about mainframes and desktops (and in desktops, the advantages of Windows are mostly non-technical, or relate to third-party software). Plan 9 was supposed to be Unix done right, with the benefit of hindsight and experience of the mistakes made. As we are talking about ways to improve OSes, in particular Unix, we will naturally mention many idea related to Plan 9.