The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix 293
riverat1 writes "After AT&T dropped the Multics project in March of 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs continued to work on the project, through a combination of discarded equipment and subterfuge, eventually writing the first programming manual for System I in November 1971. A paper published in 1974 in the Communications of the ACM on Unix brought a flurry of requests for copies. Since AT&T was restricted from selling products not directly related to telephones or telecommunications, they released it to anyone who asked for a nominal license fee. At conferences they displayed the policy on a slide saying, 'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.' From that grew an ecosystem of users supporting users much like the Linux community. The rest is history."
UNIX family tree (Score:5, Informative)
Image from wikimedia of the UNIX Family Tree [wikimedia.org]
Read some of the original Bell System docs, too (Score:5, Informative)
Several issues of the Bell System Technical Journal tell the story of UNIX [alcatel-lucent.com], in their own words. This one [alcatel-lucent.com] in particular is interesting.
Re:UNIX family tree (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Read some of the original Bell System docs, too (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the index of the July-August 1978 issue [alcatel-lucent.com] where the whole series of articles appears. Better format than the search above.
Re:Future (Score:2, Informative)
1 + Forth-sightful.
Re:UNIX family tree (Score:5, Informative)
This is a much better tree, has atleast a hundred different versions on it...
http://www.levenez.com/unix/ [levenez.com]
Re:UNIX family tree (Score:5, Informative)
That's just the "Light" version.
A more complete version is here:
http://www.levenez.com/unix/ [levenez.com]
Includes IRIX, Reliant, SINIX, Risc, Unicos, Dynix.
And more fun stuff like iOS.
Re:No support, no bug fixes (Score:4, Informative)
They actually got sued over the support. (Score:5, Informative)
So (after probably sticking their tongue out at the lawyers who originally nixed the release) they released UNIX ... and were then sued by other computer companies for violating the "phones only" clause of the anti-trust agreement. AT&T also lost that battle.
So now it was law. They couldn't suppress the technology, but they couldn't market or support it because it wasn't directly phone- related. That's where they came up with the rather convoluted system where, for a nominal price ($1 for universities, and more ($20K, I think for companies), and signing a non-disclosure agreement, anybody could get a mag tape with a working system, and source code, a pat on the back and a 'good luck'.
ALL support was done by users (who, pretty early on got better at it than any company would have been) -- but the non-disclosure agreement meant that you couldn't just post a file with the fixed code in it... so that's where diff(1) patches came into play -- they exposed the fix without exposing too much of the source code. In some cases where patches were extensive, the originator of the patch would simply announce it and require people to fax a copy of the first page of their license before being emailed the fix.
AT&T was also rather pedantic about protecting their trademark, which resulted in people often using the UN*X moniker rather than include the trademark footnote at the end of their postings.
Re:No support, no bug fixes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Future (Score:5, Informative)
After 2038, when everything is still working despite dire predictions, we will have to wait a bit for the next opportunity, when the 64 bit epoch runs out . . .
64-bit Unix time will run out on December 4, precisely at 3:30:08 PM, 292,277,026,596 AD. It will be a Sunday.
By then I fully expect computers will already have migrated well into the gigabytes-per-machine-word range, or will no longer be using bits as we know them. Either that, or we'll have encountered the heat death of the universe, so it will be irrelevant.
Re:The most intelligent OS I've ever seen (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, the camel surely looks elegant in the desert. But then again, fish don't climb trees.
Just because something works well in one area doesn't mean that it will function well outside of that area. This is why there will always be "other methods" for operating systems.
Windows is such an incredibly fragile system - all eggs in one basket. While it made sense for mass sall of PCs with a single disk, by feat it left the programs, work, operating system, registry, swap space, all on one disk. You can choose to save your work done in various suites on other drives, but they are still fooling around with Drive C:, D:, E: etc. If I need to reinstall the OS I end up with such a massive corruption of drivers I'm almost better off starting from scratch, but I'd lose all my installed programs, because Microsoft likes to keep them all in Program Files on the C: drive, where the OS resides. I can move my memory swap to another physical drive, to relieve some I/O burden, but it's not well known how to do this. Having application, operating system files, swap file and work files all on one disk is such a horrible idea, particularly without even the benefit of partitions (to protect some files or installed applications during a re-install)
I configured my first Linux box to have a tidy spot for the OS and its sources, not too much bigger than necessary (safety factor of 2). Put swap file on its own partition and installed all applications on a separate physical drive, with workspace for each on separate partitions. Flexible. I can change my harddisk configuration with a minimum of fuss. Try that with Windows.
Re:The heydays ended ten years ago (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, they are different things.
UNIX implies a specific API and several other things. Several OSes are UNIX, including Mac OS and Solaris.
Linux is an OS that is not UNIX as it intentionally does not implement the requirements for being called UNIX and as such has never and will unlikely ever be certified as a UNIX.
Just because you don't know what the words you use MEAN doesn't mean no one else does.
Re:Servers (Score:5, Informative)
Come on dude, we're talking about server systems here, not desktop unix which isn't exactly a "consumer" product.
Not even if somewhere around 10% of desktops and laptops are running Un*x [tuaw.com]? Heck, some of them are even running trademarked [opengroup.org] UNIX [opengroup.org].
Re:The heydays ended ten years ago (Score:4, Informative)
No kidding. The whole "*nix" descriptor came about because there were operating systems that were actually licensed variants of Unix, and other systems that were Unix-like, but legally could not call themselves Unix. Unix vs. Unix-like was not a technical description, but rather a legal one. Since Linux supports pretty much all the major features found in actual Unix-based systems, for all intents and purposes it is a Unix variant, even if it is a rewrite.
Re:The heydays ended ten years ago (Score:4, Informative)
I use both every day.
I don't think there's an OS sold today whose name is just "Unix", so "[using] Unix" presumably means "using an operating system that has been certified as following the Single UNIX Specification"; which particular such OSes do you use every day?
Linux is better, because it has capabilities.
If by "capabilities" you mean stuff such as "POSIX capabilities" that means you don't just have "normal privilege" and "root privilege", Solaris (which is an operating system that has been certified as following the Single UNIX Specification) has them as well.
It still has the horribly limited and antique unix-style file/folder structures, though - three octal modes
As opposed to four hexadecimal modes?
Linux, and several other UN*Xes, also support access control lists, at least on some file systems, if that's what you're contrasting with "three octal modes". (Adding a "delete" privilege and a set of permission bits for what amounts to root, to get the four hexadecimal modes, isn't a huge change.)
I used to write systems and apps code on 64-bit computers with graphical UIs, language and context-sensitive IDEs, no root superuser, and automatic versioning filesystems. But that was back in the 1980s, before the black ships came and the secret of hose gartering that never ravels was forgotten.
So what 64-bit computers were those? (Presumably that means "64-bit address space"; "does 64-bit arithmetic in one instruction" is a lot less interesting.) System/38 and AS/400 had larger address spaces, but I think they had 48-bit address spaces until the PowerPC update. (I'm not talking about the 128-bit pointers, I'm talking about the address space available to the instructions that are executed by the machine rather than to the instructions translated into machine instructions.)
I miss VMS vaxen sometimes.
(Those, of course, weren't the 64-bit computers to which you were referring. OpenVMS Alphas were, but those didn't come out until the 1990's, and OpenVMS Itaniums are, but they didn't come out until even later. In any case, you've been talking about OS features, so VAX is irrelevant.)
Re:The heydays ended ten years ago (Score:4, Informative)
Congratulations, you are the blind man holding the trunk of the elephant. Those other blind men you are responding to are holding a leg or a tail or an ear.
Actually, my eyes work quite well, and can see that there are a pile of different UN*X systems out there, which are similar in a lot of ways (a lot of core APIs, for example) and different in a lot of ways (system administration quirks, for example). If you focus on the parts that are most different, they're all weird in their own ways, with Mac OS X not necessarily being any worse than others (hey, at least ifconfig works the way it's supposed to); if you focus on the parts that are most similar, they're all close enough to call them UN*X.