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."
The next one will go to BS. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bjarne Stroustrup, that is. After all, C++ has those ++ over C...
Platform neutral (Score:5, Insightful)
The C programming language was designed with the same platform-abstracting ideas in mind. Unfortunately later C libraries (past those of ANSI/ISO C) started becoming more and more platform specific (mostly as a result of vendors either doing it "their way" or deliberately tying people to their platform). Later on, Java would grow for the same reason again, but with far more extensive standardized libraries covering what people wanted to do in the Internet Age (sockets, HTTP, multi-threading, platform-independent GUI [Swing with Nimbus looks great and performs well ever since rendering was fully hardware accelerated in 1.6.0_u10]).
Unfortunately we're at the stage where vendors are seeking to close things out again. Apple makes wonderful hardware but their walled garden approach is counterproductive from a global industry perspective (and why they will arguably 'fail' to set the standards for software a second time around, for the same reasons, but will make a colossal amount of money anyway). Google's Android is better, but is still a little bit of a walled garden. Hopefully innovation in profit will move elsewhere ('standardization' of one sort or another eventually comes to almost all technologies) and allow things to settle down in the phone space - and allow the cross-platform ideals of UNIX to once again return. One day I hope that phones are sufficiently powerful (processing and energy/battery life) that developing for them is as simple as for the embedded, desktop and server spaces (which have specialized libraries but are essentially the same these days [if you are using Java]).
Re:The real story (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:mad props (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not so much about security as it is about flexibility and a new way of doing things. At the time Unix was created, most operating systems where huge, ugly and complex beasts, developed in a bureaucratic way by enormous corporations. Software development was done similarly to the way processors are designed. It was a land of engineers, not a land of hackers. Unix was simpler, more elegant, modular and hacker friendly. At the time, OSs where written in assembly, almost no exceptions. Have you ever seen a mainframe sysadmin? Those guys where running the circus back then. Then this bunch of hippies came in and wrote an OS in a high-level language, and it turned out to be awesome. Unix was the software-world response to the social events and revolutions during the 60's.
At first, it wasn't as evolved or secure as other systems, and it was ridiculed because of that. But Unix is like Lego, and there was a huge amount of young people in computing that related to this concept, and could do awesome things with the building blocks provided by Unix.
It was the first OS to change the way things where done and introduce metaphors in computing. People think thap FApple and m$ started the metaphor-in-computing trend, with icons, menues and folders. That's just not true. "Everything is a file" was a revolution. The simple, short commands, pipes, advanced interactive shells, all of that made Unix the choice of a new generation. And it still is, anyone serious about software development is on some kind of Unix variant. It's wasn't the technical merits of Unix, it was the philosophy that made it so huge.
I once asked RMS if he could imagine the Free Software world as it is today, developing something like the Incompatible time-sharing system. Of course, this is RMS and I didn't really get a straight answer, he just rambled about how it wasn't a valid question because the Incompatible time-sharing system wasn't modern enough to be usable nowdays. But I know the answer is NO. The Unix model and Free Software have a LOT in common, and Unix helped pave the way for the way the world works right now. Whether the usual suspects like it or not, Free Software runs most of the Internet, and the world as we know wouldn't exist without the internet. Unix has always been the man behind the curtain, but it's been more relevant in the last 40 years of history than many think. Even now, it's still obscure, think, for instance, how everyone has a Unix OS in their pocket (Android phones/tablets and other devices, ipods/iphones/ipads), and most don't even know about it. It was about damn time that it got some mainstream recognition.