Inventors of Unix Win Japan Prize 105
jbrodkin writes "The inventors of Unix and the C programming language, one of whom also created the first master-level chess-playing machine, have been awarded the prestigious Japan Prize for their work in building the Unix operating system in 1969. Ken Thompson, who is now a distinguished engineer at Google, and Dennis Ritchie, who is retired, were researchers at Bell Labs four decades ago when they 'developed the Unix operating system which has significantly advanced computer software, hardware and networks over the past four decades, and facilitated the realization of the Internet,' the Japan Prize Foundation said Tuesday in awarding them the 2011 prize. The pair join previous winners such as Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. In addition to developing Unix, Thompson also played a key role in building Belle, the first chess-playing computer to achieve a master-level rating and five-time winner of the now-defunct North American Computer Chess Championship in the 1970s and 1980s. Ritchie and Thompson have also been credited with developing the C programming language, a process that occurred in conjunction with the development of Unix."
Re:mad props (Score:4, Informative)
You apparently never used Unix during the 70s and 80s. Unix "security" was a constant joke at least until the mid 90s.
Instrumental in creating commercial Internet (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the actual Al Gore quote:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clumsy and self serving wording, yes. Claims to have invented the Internet? No, not at all. He was just saying that his policies helped create the Internet as we know it today, which is somewhat true. What he REALLY did was cosponsor the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992 which opened the Internet to commercial traffic.
So, we can really thank Gore for pop-up ads and spam, not the whole Internet.
Re:mad props (Score:3, Informative)
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook [simson.net] [pdf]
Foreword
By Donald A. Norman
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook? Why? Of what earthly good could it be? Who is the audience? What a perverted idea.
But then again, I have been sitting here in my living room—still wearing my coat—for over an hour now, reading the manuscript. One and one-half hours. What a strange book. But appealing. Two hours. OK, I give up: I like it. It’s a perverse book, but it has an equally perverse appeal. Who would have thought it: Unix, the hacker’s pornography.
When this particular rock-throwing rabble invited me to join them, I thought back to my own classic paper on the subject, so classic it even got reprinted in a book of readings. But it isn’t even referenced in this one. Well, I’ll fix that:
What is this horrible fascination with Unix? The operating system of the 1960s, still gaining in popularity in the 1990s. A horrible system, except that all the other commercial offerings are even worse. The only operating system that is so bad that people spend literally millions of dollars trying to improve it. Make it graphical (now that’s an oxymoron, a graphical user interface for Unix).
You know the real trouble with Unix? The real trouble is that it became so popular. It wasn’t meant to be popular. It was meant for a few folks working away in their labs, using Digital Equipment Corporation’s old PDP-11 computer. I used to have one of those. A comfortable, room-sized machine. Fast—ran an instruction in roughly a microsecond. An elegant instruction set (real programmers, you see, program in assembly code). Toggle switches on the front panel. Lights to show you what was in the registers. You didn’t have to toggle in the boot program anymore, as you did with the PDP-1 and PDP-4, but aside from that it was still a real computer. Not like those toys we have today that have no flashing lights, no register switches. You can’t even single-step today’s machines. They always run at full speed.
The PDP-11 had 16,000 words of memory. That was a fantastic advance over my PDP-4 that had 8,000. The Macintosh on which I type this has 64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM? Unix was designed before the days of CRT displays on the console. For many of us, the main input/output device was a 10-character/second, all uppercase teletype (advanced users had 30- character/second teletypes, with upper- and lowercase, both). Equipped with a paper tape reader, I hasten to add. No, those were the real days of computing. And those were the days of Unix. Look at Unix today: the remnants are still there. Try logging in with all capitals. Many Unix systems will still switch to an all-caps mode. Weird.
Unix was a programmer’s delight. Simple, elegant underpinnings. The user interface was indeed horrible, but in those days, nobody cared about such things. As far as I know, I was the very first person to complain about it in writing (that infamous Unix article): my article got swiped from my computer, broadcast over UUCP-Net, and I got over 30 single-spaced pages of taunts and jibes in reply. I even got dragged to Bell Labs to stand up in front of an overfilled auditorium to defend myself. I survived. Worse, Unix survived.
Unix was designed for the computing environment of then, not the machines of today. Unix survives only because everyone else has done so badly. There were many valuable things to be learned from Unix: how come nobody learned them and then did better? Started from scratch and produced a really superior, modern, graphical operating system? Oh yeah,
Re:mad props (Score:4, Informative)
UNIX was designed to be as scalable, robust, and secure (relative to standards in those days) as they could possibly build it.
Redirection, Pipes, shells, heck the whole IO structure of UNIX was/is IMHO a great work of art.
Then other people started adding stuff to UNIX and eventually Linux that just kept making it better and better like PERL, Apache, X, .... many more.
UNIX is just and has always been good stuff.
Re:Yeah, they got it right. (Score:4, Informative)
OSX is unix with an aqua graphical user interface/theme.
Re:Platform neutral (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thompson can't check-in code at Google because. (Score:2, Informative)
"Prove his mettle" is not exactly correct. I took the Google C++ coding test. It's not to test that you can code well; it's just to test that you are aware of Google's internal style guidelines (things like indentation, variable naming conventions, and the like). It's a good way to emphasize the importance of stylistically consistent code.
Incidentally, I love this approach because I HATE having to go through messy code. Ugh. For some bizarre reason, master's students with several years of industry experience just cannot figure out how to correctly indent code.