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Unix Operating Systems Software

The History of UNIX 107

Posted by CmdrTaco from the a-light-fluffy-read dept.
Tucros writes "There is a nice article over at Bell-Labs.com detailing the History of UNIX." This is a somewhat lengthy bit with lots of entertaining stuff that normally would just be sorta anecdotal. I enjoyed this one a lot.
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The History of UNIX More

The History of UNIX

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  • Download these before SCO goes bankrupt! http://www.sco.com/offers/ancient001/ you can even find emulators at http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/PUPS/

  • Ancient USENET .sig:

    "UNIX? What do I need UNIX for? I don't even have a harem."
    -- A VMS User

  • All network administrators need UNIX as all network administrators have harems.
  • If you hang around on alt.os.multics, this topic comes up from time to time. As I recall, there was a posting way back in 1988 or so, from a fellow by the name of Bob Monk (sp?) at Mitre, who was doing an OS on the '386 with many of the memory-management features of Multics.

    Heck, in 1986, I did a simple kernel on the 286 with memory rings, full segmentation, etc. It was pretty nifty: due to the segmentation, you could call "realloc()" and get back the same pointer, but it would point to a segment of the desired size.

    But it is commonly thought that a "port" of Multics would be well-nigh impossible. The old Honeywell hardware was 36-bit and had lots of special hardware features. Check out Organick's book for the gory details.

    At one point, I proposed (to the alt.os.multics group) writing a Multics hardware emulator in software, so that the old binaries could be run as-is. The idea left many of the graybeards shaking their heads, due to the complexity of the task. But if someone were to put together sufficient funding, there is no practical barrier to the implementation.

    Of course, you'd have to get the IP rights to the original Honeywell object, source, and probably CPU schematics (ugh). But a modern Pentium megagigaherz could probably run a Multics emulator at a decent clip, even if it were written in Java.

    And then, I could use "ted" again.
  • I don't think its him guys.... He spelled his name wrong.

    Besides he wouldn't waste his time here.
  • You CAN charge for a GPL'd program. The question is Who will pay for it.

    The only thing you must do is distribute the source and allow users to redistribute freely. Nothing says you cannot sell the program. Its not free beer its freedom!

    Freedom to have the same rights as the author.

    It doesn't make much sense to sell GPL'd software because of this but it doesn't disallow it.

    Dave
  • As multics was a large bloated behemoth, unix (eunuchs) was intended for smaller networks (at the time)
    UNIX was born in 1970. There were really no "networks" at that time (that is, no computers linked by what we think of as networks). For what networks there were, see this atlas. [cybergeography.org] (Or perhaps you simply meant smaller machines?)
  • In a DnD environment, do this:

    myprog | grep somepattern | sort | uniq

    No graphical tools exist that I can think of that would let me do this. However, if they do exist, I want them :)
    --
  • No one else has mentioned this, but another book about the history of Unix is 'Life with Unix' subtitled 'A guide for everyone' by Don Libes and Sandy Ressler, ISBN 0-13-536657-7
  • This is funny, Yes, anyone that takes 10 minutes can use the shell commands to do most anything. Those that bitch about it are in fact lazy or just true morons that cannot handle cognitiave thought processes. Here in my office, I have been able to get several "morons" to use the command line. they do so easily, and it took only a small amount of time to do so. Why? you ask... Why not make a point and drool icon for them? well, now the user actually understands what happens when the commands happen. instead of "the thingy did the other thingy". A GUI system has it's place, when you have graphically intensive needs (WSYWYG,GIS,Graphic arts, games) but when the Computer department (I ain't gonna use IS or IT, we are COMPUTER people!) get's ahold of it they say "I wish we could really dumb down the computer... these secretaries,sales,management people are morons that cant understand Unix.". Voila! Windows is born! Granted, it wasnt born for this use, it is us that abused it to the point where it is now. WE abuse the windowing system to the extent that people that have no reason to have a computer have one now.

    me? Yeah i use Gnome... to run 3 Xterms.
  • I used SCO Xenix in 1989.. and I remember how it really stunk! $890.00 for the OS, $690.00 for the C libraries,$1100.00 for the TeX system. We pirated the TeX and C libs at the university until there was a free alternative.(Major Grin!) After that we learned that SCO butchered the C libs so badly that the Code you wrote was not portable in any sense (Ok printf worked)

    No, SCO made no friends with anyone who used their releases...

  • I guess Sequent's Symmetry that could have up to 24 processors (running 386s) in 1989 doesn't count as SMP support to folks in Redmond. Pity. They were 11 years behind the Mac on the UI front too (1995, 1984).

    ---
  • thanks, anonymous coward. this is not the exact map i remember (the one i recall was musch more complete, solaris, freebsd, openbsd and netbsd were included). it's possible somebody took this map and added to it. however, it was a directed graph, but i'm not sure if it was a graphic image, or ascii-based. i'll keep looking. thanks for your help.
  • thanks for the pointers, kevin. amazon and bn show 'magic garden explained' out of print. i'll check out my geek friends' libraries and other sources.

  • > Another Little Known Fact: One of the main reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire was that without a 0 in their number system, they had no way of knowing whether or not their system calls were working...

    There were lots of other flaws to their number system as well. For instance, 1337 5kr1p7 k1dd13 had to be spelled iiiiiiivii vkripvii kiddiiii, which is almost impossible to parse correctly.

    --
  • I keep hearing people calling UNIX obselete, but can't recall hearing exactly why it's obsolete? Could you direct me to these superior technologies that should have displaced UNIX?

  • Great, now I have to pull out 'ol operation Mindcrime again. It's my "sail away" (cartmann)..

    I think it is interesting to see the "baby bells" becoming their parents again. Rather scary. However, the FCC didn't split them up, so there was no rule about getting back together.

    I really wouldn't see why a unified phone system would be too bad. At least I'd have DSL by now (or 2 years ago) but I don't want another BT after hearing what those poor blokes in UK have to go through. Pity that, and the whole BBC thing. But at least BBC has some quality programming, and a good website.

  • Agreed. No mention either of the fact that after the Multics debacle, Thompson, Ritchie, et al. were in effect cast into the dungeon - banished to a grim building in a remote corner of the Murray Hill campus to meditate on the error of their ways. Which they did. They realized that the reason Multics failed was that it tried to do everything for everybody all at once. They saw that a more modular approach would be more flexible and robust. The Unix philosophy was born and the name was a play on words to let everybody know that this was not Multics; in fact it was quite the opposite.
  • Even we old folks like to revisit the UNIX root occasionally.
  • The beauty of AutoCAD release 14 is that finally AutoCAD can speak with a persistent LISP ;)

    setvar lispinit 0 -- and lisp functions and data survive loading a new drawing.
  • We're about to colonise Mars?!

    When did that happen?

    dave
  • You want Unix jokes? How about a collection of Anti-Unix/MS-Windows jokes [levitte.org]? This is from a site dedicated to Information about the VMS operating system. [levitte.org] Sour grapes, perhaps?

    Code is garbage in garbage out.
    Languge is garbage in, non-sequitor out.
  • bah. all of us old timers know the best anti-UNIX jokes come from the guys who wrote UNIX [catalog.com]. including a foreword by none other than dennis ritchie himself. :)

  • 1. The name unix was made as a play on words of "multics" the multi-user operating system used at bell labs at the time. 2. Linux came about because the op of the FTP site that Linus origionaly put the code on didn't like Linus' choice of name of 'freeix' (phreaks & free unix), I just don't like BS.
    --
    Laptop006 (RHCE: That means I know what I'm talking about! When talking about linux at least...)
  • I'd be interested in finding a URL that explains
    why the superuser is called ROOT, and
    what the logic in the directory divides of
    /usr/lib verses /lib and /bin verses /usr/bin
    and /sbin verses /usr/sbin, and all the X11R6
    directories, etc. It would be nice to know
    where and why files are kept where they are kept in unix, so that one might understand the structure of his own OS installation alot better..

    -Matthew
  • Obviously it's not necessary in any immediate, practical sense to know the year of the Magna Carta.

    No, but the Magna Carta (1215, BTW) set the groundwork for our modern justice system with the idea that the accused has the right to trial by a jury of his peers. It is a rather important document in western history, which is why any decent western histort class should discuss it, preferably at some length so you understand its relevance, not just when it was signed.

    (OK, John first called "Lackland" (as his father, Henry, and mother, Eleanor of Aquitane (who was a minor figure in the start of the 100 years war, married two kings, mothered several, and left all her land to Richard the Lionhearted) didn't give him squat) ended up king of England (he was also known as "Bad King John), mostly because all his older brothers died. He was so utterly oppressive that the English Baronry rose up and demanded he sign the Magna Carta (great letter? great something -- my Latin has gone to hell it would seem) to make sure he couldn't keep stripping them of land, titles and freedom without any sort of trial. It originally only assured landed, titled men to trial by a jury of thier peers, but it was a pretty important start)
  • Well, if you print the entire sentence, there are clues, but it's still odd:

    Like another legendary creature whose name also ends in 'x,' UNIX rose from the ashes of a multi-organizational effort in the early 1960s to develop a dependable timesharing operating system.

    "...rose from the ashes..." indicates a pheonix, but it can't be a pheonix because the ashes the phoenix rose from were not those of a multi-organizational effort in the early 1960's to develop a dependable timesharing operating system.

    I'm puzzled.


    "If you look under the bed, you can see my house from here." -- Pulp
  • I'm pretty sure they were referring to the Phoenix. Check out just about any episode of G-Force for a demonstration of the mythological underpinnings :)

    Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
  • I'd like to write a history of the Axe, except that mine keeps rebooting itself for no reason. I'm running WinAxe 3.1 with Internet Axplorer 3 and many people have told me to upgrade to 95, although I don't see why-- I don't use many 32-bit Axe apps anyway.

  • there's one inside The Magic Garden Explained.

    I would guess you could also find this in Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD, and other histories of Unix.

    I seem to remember also seeing it in books on system administration.
  • Modern example: object oriented components.

  • Also during 1969, Thompson developed the game of `Space Travel.' First written on Multics, then transliterated into Fortran for GECOS (the operating system for the GE, later Honeywell, 635), it was nothing less than a simulation of the movement of the major bodies of the Solar System, with the player guiding a ship here and there, observing the scenery, and attempting to land on the various planets and moons. The GECOS version was unsatisfactory in two important respects: first, the display of the state of the game was jerky and hard to control because one had to type commands at it, and second, a game cost about $75 for CPU time on the big computer. It did not take long, therefore, for Thompson to find a little-used PDP-7 computer with an excellent display processor; the whole system was used as a Graphic-II terminal. He and I rewrote Space Travel to run on this machine. The undertaking was more ambitious than it might seem; because we disdained all existing software, we had to write a floating-point arithmetic package, the pointwise specification of the graphic characters for the display, and a debugging subsystem that continuously displayed the contents of typed-in locations in a corner of the screen. All this was written in assembly language for a cross-assembler that ran under GECOS and produced paper tapes to be carried to the PDP-7.

    Space Travel, though it made a very attractive game, served mainly as an introduction to the clumsy technology of preparing programs for the PDP-7. Soon Thompson began implementing the paper file system (perhaps `chalk file system' would be more accurate) that had been designed earlier. A file system without a way to exercise it is a sterile proposition, so he proceeded to flesh it out with the other requirements for a working operating system, in particular the notion of processes. Then came a small set of user-level utilities: the means to copy, print, delete, and edit files, and of course a simple command interpreter (shell). Up to this time all the programs were written using GECOS and files were transferred to the PDP-7 on paper tape; but once an assembler was completed the system was able to support itself. Although it was not until well into 1970 that Brian Kernighan suggested the name `Unix,' in a somewhat treacherous pun on `Multics,' the operating system we know today was born.

    I knew it.. the gamers always push the leading edge of technology. :-)

  • Multics was a behemoth of a system. the name unix was at least in part derived from multics as somewhat of a joke.

    As multics was a large bloated behemoth, unix (eunuchs) was intended for smaller networks (at the time)

    I think that nobody knew how much of an impact unix would have when it was being initially being developed in a forgotten lab in the bell labs empire on a pdp-7 machine which was found unused on the floor ready to be discarded.

  • I don't think its him guys.... He spelled his name wrong.

    He spelled it "Torllvalds." Perhaps he meant "Trollvalds."

    An idjit in Minus One Hell where s/h/it belongs, and yet another reason why Slashdot needs killfiles.


    --
    Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
    Delenda est Windoze

  • When you get Windoze 2000 to boot on 512 processors all at once in a single image, then we'll talk about multiprocessing support. I do that regularly with Irix. Cray, with Unicos/mk can boot 1800 processors. Windows does.... Hmm... 8? Or do you consider supercomputing a "trivial" task? If not, be prepared to explain why *none* of the machines listed at top500.org are running Windows.
  • Actually, as I recall, they did volunteer to do it. Of course, the gov't would have made them do it *eventually*, but I believe they saw the writing on the wall, and made the only logical move, which is, in my most humble opinion, pretty damn smart.
  • Also, IIRC, any one of the baby bells is raking in FAR more than AT&T ever did. Microsoft might take note. Now, every time I'm weak, words scream from my arm.
  • is that there are no links to 'Space Travel'. Dammit they hyped up that game more than quake, so now i've got to see it.
    "Simulate an entire solar system", "Fly between and land on the various planets", "Rendered in stunning graphics" (What is stunning graphics on a PDP-7?) Oh wait, its probably in PDP assembly. Bah, maybe they open sourced it ;)

  • Yeah, and the comment about ATT "divesting itself" of the baby bells. Yeah right, it was not like the Federal Government *made em* do it, they wanted to break up.

    Heh.

  • I think the oreilly SysAdmin book had a tree showing the major branches.
  • I refer you to Andrew Tanenbaum's OS books (eg Modern Operating Systems) for a brief history of UNIX. http://www.multicians.org may have some info as well.
  • why not write the history of the axe?

    Because /. is for computers, and this site [netsword.com] is for axes, silly.
  • This is all nonsense!

    Bell Labs didn't create Unix!! I created Unix!! Bell labs is the devil!!!
  • Read any paper or article where some two-bit reporter mentions UNIX or GNU, and watch him bitching about those complicated commands, ackward syntax, and what not. Now that's a person who never took the half hour it takes a chimpanse to learn the effect of the ``|''. It's almost not funny

    Well I'm not a chimp, but I have an arts degree...

    I can, however, spell Chimpanzee, and write a 30 page essay on how it relates to contemporary neo-feminist criticism. ;)

    I know the effect of "|". After reading the article, I now understand what it does and why. That is the value of history. Just one of those damn now that makes sense! moments in life.

  • Has it been 30 years? Wow, to think I'm only 18... and people say software dies very quickly, like quicker than people. Ahhhh.... I'm in a reminiscing mood today...
  • I'd be curious to read a history of all popular OS's, from timesharing and UNIX to NT and Linux.

    I'd like to see the similarities and differences that are threshed out over time (what, for example, are the fundamental differences between Windows 2000 and the best UNIX systems? What's the same?)

  • don't dump on Linus, he works hard
  • Try http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=eun uch

    "eunuch (ynk)
    n.

    1.A castrated man employed as a harem attendant or as a functionary in certain Asian
    courts.
    2.A man or boy whose testes are nonfunctioning or have been removed. "

    "eunuch \Eu"nuch\, Eunuchate \Eu"nuch*ate\, v. t. [L. eunuchare.] To make a eunuch of; to castrate. as
    a man. --Creech. Sir. T. Browne. "

    "eunuch n : a man who has been castrated and is incapable of reproduction; "eunuchs guarded the
    harem" [syn: castrate] "

    [Insert UNIX vs eunuch joke here, or "UNIX ate my balls" :-)]
  • People never dedicate attention to the really creative and innovative technologies, like Li sp Machines, so they're stuck in worshipping truly obsolete systems like Unix.

    Well, the winners write the history books. When the hard AI/LISP community finally recovers from their crushing, total defeat by neurofuzzy systems, maybe they'll do it.

    But, even worse, worshipping technology in and of itself is stupid. Technology is a tool. Do you worship axes? If you worship computers enough to write a history of an obsolete OS, why not write the history of the axe?

    Unix is the work of great artists. Art inspires us to greatness. The history of Unix shows us people on the edge, how they acted, what decisions they made, and how they felt about it. Important for those who want to be doing that today. The rest can just go back to playing Quake.

  • If you consider the "Enterprise" doing small, simple tasks, then yes you're right, Microsoft is doing well there. I can tell you from experience that when we tried to switch over from Tru64 to NT 4/Intel for our FORTRAN data processing (at the time we were writing chemical analysis systems), it was a complete joke. The system gave us "illegal operations" and hex dumps (on that blue screen with grey writing) at least twice a day.

    I've never run an "Enterprise" server, but unless it doesn't require a lot of resources, I simply can't see how Microsoft "owns" the Enterprise. It's ridiculous. In the scientific community, NT is considered something of a joke. I don't see it being different in the "Enterprise" Market, unless the "Enterprise" Market has very, very low expectations.

  • A Good Joke: (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Unix may suck, but Miguel swallows." - Anonymous

    (snicker..heheeee)

  • Re:map of unices? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://www.research.att.com/~north/graphviz/exampl es/directed/unix.html
  • About the only place I see this going on in modern program design is the mp3 players and that is a result of the people who do good UI work generaly don't have the skill set to do the MP3 decoding so they link to something like mpg123.

    Hmmm, mp3 players with Good UIs? Not all skins are made equal.

    I think a lot of web and net based apps show examples of people using different tools as well.

    You've got your lightweight database, an XML parser, some sort of servlet runner or http engine. Hook them all together and you can create some pretty choice net based apps.

    In a lot of cases you can swap out different tools for more powerful or less weight without affecting the rest of your code.

  • Being a UNIX guru is very castrating. For the ignorant, look up "Eunuch" on Yahoo.

    If you're feeling really brave, you might also look up Eunice. It was a UNIX-like environment running under VMS. There used to be entries in some early versions of autoconf that ran something along the lines of "checking for eunice... not found, fortunately".

  • something to do with grading the possible transmission of information in such subtle ways as someone replying to an email or not replying to an email (ie: regardless of the content of the message, this accounts for one bit of unpredictable information)

    Sounds like a story about "covert channels"; I don't know to which story your professor was referring, but here's one story about covert channels [multicians.org] from the multicians.org site [multicians.org].

  • If you worship computers enough to write a history of an obsolete OS, why not write the history of the axe?

    This has been done [mjdtools.com]. History is a great tool, as I'm sure you're aware. To someone like yourself you could use this history to tell you how NOT to design an OS. Personally, I find it incredibly interesting.

    Oh, and as you pointed out in a later article, it "took all of 30 seconds" to find the axe history "in Google."
  • Interesting, but don't the "roots" at some point become so distant as to be irrelevant? Isn't it better to look forwards, solving the problems of today and tomorrow, than to stay in the past constantly trying to re-solve old and obsolete problems?

    If you don't know where you are coming from, going forward might take you somewhere you have already been.

    And the point to doing that is....?

    Woz
  • >But, even worse, worshipping technology in and of itself is stupid.

    No argument about that. But the history of UNIX is far more interesting than other OS platforms for several reasons: it's the history of a definable sub-group of people, who are not bound by ties of employment or purchasing to one specific company, but are bound together because of the tools they created, shared, & refined.

    This includes people who were interested in computer research, who were interested in developing technology or useful arts, & those who were interested in spreading the word about a technology either out of religious-like enthusiasm or to make a buck. There's a richness here that you just don't find with the history of, say, Windows 95 or the Amiga. (I know, I'm setting myself up to be flamed.)

    Geoff

  • Richard Stallman maintained the MIT Lisp Machine sources after the split with Symbolics in the early 80s. The GNU project is a direct consequence of what he took away from this whole sorry episode, which effectively killed the sharing of a great technology that was way ahead of its time.

    Because of RMS's correct priorities for promulgating his ideas on free software, he choose a Unix style because, as much as he innovated in non-Unix areas (including TECO, Emacs, and the fabulous ITS operating system), he realized that Unix-like systems would have the virus-like qualities that would carry the GNU philosophy around the world. Even a Unix-hater could perceive that (most of them know Unix better than the fanboyz themselves).

    Mentioning NeXT is a little ironic because one of the main authors of the Unix-Haters handbook, Simson Garfinkle, wrote for NeXTWorld. While it is true that NeXTStep was built on a Unix base, the NeXT APIs and UI design are pretty much non-Unix in philosophy, having more to do with Smalltalk, Lisp, and the Macintosh. A lot of Unix diehards really hated NeXTStep back in the day; my theory is that they were offended by a Unix variant that was more concerned with being compatible with people than being compatible with Unix design mistakes and seriously flawed Unix-associated software like X Windows.

    Also, I beleive that whitehouse.org was running CL-HTTP, at least at first. Whoever said that there no http servers written in Lisp was making a losing bet -- it would probably be more difficult to make a list of computer languages and platforms for which web servers are not written !

  • I don't think multics was shelved. I know that there was a Honeywell computer running Multics in the Detroit area (Wayne State U maybe?) in the late 1980's. I'm sure you can find out what the last operational Multics site in the world was. Maybe it's still up today!

    How about a Multics port to the '86 architecture?

  • Yup, though there likely was a reason why he did it: all the other system calls at that time were five letters or less. Rather than make "creat" break the rule (and perhaps mess up those nice neat columns of assembler code -- you did read enough of the article to know that Unix was originally written in assembler, hmmm?) he dropped off the "e".

    Typing on those old ASR-33's got to be painful after a while; you had to press pretty hard on those keys and then klunk! it would press in and bottom out. There is a reason all those ancient Unix commands were so short!

    -Ed
  • It was also asserted by said prof that MULTICS was shelved so that it wouldn't compete with a proprietary OS by the same company.

    I believe the competing operating system was GE/Honeywell's GCOS. As far as I know, they kept on selling Multics until the hardware, which had special features to support the operating system, was discontinued. Security conscious users, such as the NSA, liked Multics. NSA's dockmaster system ran Multics.

  • Hahah, If this was a troll, well hell I'll bite.

    Win2K doesn't need to work on four dozen different processors; it's got a good one already,

    So you tout Windows's lack of portability as a strong point?! Makes you wonder how bad the weak points are... LOL!

    Win2K has solved the stability issue. It's got superior SMP support to most variants of UNIX (vastly superior to Linux and BSD).

    Let's see some facts... Let's hear some numbers. Still, half way into your spewage we only have mindless blathering and opinion.

    UNIX with working SMP is grossly overpriced compared to Win2K.

    As long as you don't consider Linux to be a UNIX, then yes you are correct.

    Golly gee, Win2K is cheaper, more powerful, just as stable . . .

    Again, where are the numbers? Where are the facts?

    Yea now that I think about it, it looks like I was just trolled. Oh well sometimes its fun to feed you guys. Carry on!
  • i once saw a map that showed a tree graph of how the various unices morphed, merged, split, and evolved. think anybody could point me to it?
  • I dont know many ideas or concepts beeing able used for such a long time, and its nice to read about how a great idea was implemented.
  • The concept of data having a security level that flows with it has been around for a long time. It was requried for the orange book "B" level security and we all should know how long ago the orange book has been obsolite.
  • >and people say software dies very quickly

    Not to squash your reminiscing mood, I just wanted to remind you that the people who speak so casually of software are from a different world than the one Unix resides in. Personally I still use Pine, Sendmail, Lynx, and a slew of programs older than me. But in that other world, the OS gets replaced every 3 years, you need more memory and a larger CPU just to run a word proccessor, the web browser takes longer to load itself than it takes to load most sites, and those are the highlites of their world. If you were still in it, you would say the same thing about software.

    Devil Ducky
  • Yep. The Bell Labs article was fascinating history but it didn't say anything about the decision to charge thousand$ for UNIX and the attempt to destroy BSD.

  • Another Little Known Fact:

    One of the main reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire was that without a 0 in their number system, they had no way of knowing whether or not their system calls were working...

    Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
  • Before you accept the received histories of institutions such as the Smithsonian and Bell Labs, you should compare their histories of the invention of the transistor with this Revision to the History of the Invention of the Transistor. [geocities.com]

  • Anyone know if it's still possible to get some of that old hardware? I would love to have a teletype-based Linux terminal. :o)
  • I don't think any history becomes completely irrelevant. Maybe it doesn't teach you a skill or open up any doors immediatly but the point of history is to get a better perspective on "How it is". I really don't like history that much to be honest but it does give a good grounding in what to expect from different situations. Computer history I think is more interesting because it actually is relevant, computers are continually derived from the previous generations just like civilizations, but everything happens so quickly in computers the origins of computer history are only 50 years ago, which is the dawn of time as far as computers are concerned. (Babbage doesn't count, not really) I love computer history, because the results seem so close, most of the fathers of computing are still alive. Me defending history, what are the odds?

  • I thought the history channel was going to do something like this, but it turns out that it was "The History of Eunuchs."
  • Yes, it is my opinion. Are there any analogies that aren't?

    I'm decrying knowledge without understanding. People can learn to operate computers by using the levers and knobs provided them, but I think this will always be a more tedious and error-prone endeavor if the operator doesn't understand the context of those knobs and buttons. This isn't even about GUI vs CLI -- it's about thinking that the GUI *is* the computer, or the CLI *is* the computer. The GUI provides a better example, though, because it's intentionally an analogy, so the problem of people taking the analogy as reality is more clear.

    And I'm going to defend my history analogy, too. How would you even imagine such a thing as distorted "official" histories, if history had not provided so many examples? (Unless it's a staple of Britney Spears' music, maybe.) And all the people fighting their centuries-old conflicts are the last ones I'd point to as understanding history.

    Mainly, though, I was reacting to the idea that knowing Unix is pointless. I'm not advocating that everyone be forced to learn it, but I don't know anyone whose experience with computers was not enhanced by it.
  • From "The Creation of the UNIX* Operating System"

    "Like another legendary creature whose name also ends in 'x,'"

    What "creature could they mean"?

    The Lorax? The Sphynx?

  • gwernol wrote:
    Interesting, but don't the "roots" at some point become so distant as to be irrelevant? Isn't it better to look forwards, solving the problems of today and tomorrow, than to stay in the past constantly trying to re-solve old and obsolete problems?
    Of course not. Lots of "new" things are re-applications of what came before. There's actually very little that can be called, "new." That is, there's very little that is revolutionary and unlike anything that came before.

    Furthermore, many people downplay the need for studying such things as optimization. Back when you had to fit your entire OS and applications into 32k on a machine that could only perform a few tens of thousands of instructions per second, optimization for both size and speed were important. Projects like SETI@Home and whatnot can make use of these ideas to make even today's best machines work better!

  • Question everything!

    Why should I?
  • How about this link: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html [bell-labs.com] ? (The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System)
  • I was amused by the tripe that Bell labs was putting forward as the "history" of UNIX. Note that the focus was on Bell Labs, and less on the idea that Unix was in reality a skunk works project to build a word processing package from scrap equipment. ("There was this PDP-7 gathering dust in the closet..." is one line I remember.) The second system to host UNIX was an IBM System 360. Don't remember the exact model.

    No mention on the Labs page of the "B" programming language, developed as a "high level assembler" to speed the development of the project so that the bosses wouldn't get too upset. What makes the above claim believable is when you take the PDP-7 instruction set and compare it to the operations set in the original K&R C language set, you find almost a one-for-one match, including indirection! Many of the other features of Unix which makes it so popular are there not only because they were good ideas, but they had to get something working quickly, and not spend a lot of time debugging. Code reuse? Speeds up debug. Pipes? String together what you have, don't reinvent the wheel. The shell? Interpreted code may run slow, but it is much faster to write and debug. Speed of implementation was paramount when you were doing something that, er, you weren't supposed to be doing...

    As for the eventual audience of this skunk-works project, there is a legand (which may or may not be true) that the system was to be used by lawyers for word-processing stuff -- it was a cheaper alternative to buying a word-processor system like the one sold by NBI. Anyone recall the Writer's Workbench that used to ship with SCO Unix and other Unix systems? Now you know.

  • UNIX were highly respected members of society in Roman times. They were used to protect high-ranking women, as they could almost certainly be trusted to Do The Right Thing. Their history is very interesting reading.

    I can't believe that was moderated down! That was very funny. Either the moderator who did that takes UNIX way too seriously, or he just didn't get it.

    Being a UNIX guru is very castrating.


    For the ignorant, look up "Eunuch" on Yahoo [yahoo.com].

  • If you're feeling really brave, you might also look up Eunice. It was a UNIX-like environment running under VMS. There used to be entries in some early versions of autoconf that ran something along the lines of "checking for eunice... not found, fortunately".

    That's something that I didn't see getting covered on the History of UNIX webpage. I mean, cracks about UNIX' unfortunate homonym should be legion to its history.

    When I was first introduced to UNIX - not accidentally coincidental with my first Internet account back in 1988 - it was by a guy who sounded like High Pitched Eric off the Howard Stern Radio Show.

    Between the combination of the frequent use of the word "UNIX" and the spoken falsetto this guy had, I was feeling very protective of the ol' family jewels.

    A few years after that, in 1996 and at the ripe old age of 22, I was in a rush to get to a meeting. Get this: the meeting was for the National Capital Freenet, which used Solaris and was one of my early forms of Internet connectivity. I finished urinating, and in a hurry, I caught myself in my zipper. I got to find out how it felt to speak with a falsetto for a few days. However, it wasn't without its benefits; when I went to the hospital, the doc there circumcised me, and my only regret about being circumcised is that the zipper accident didn't happen sooner in my life.

    UNIX hit me way too close to home that day.

  • I haven't stumbled across any webservers written in LISP...

    If your main means of locomotion is "stumbling", you won't get far in this world... CL-HTTP [mit.edu] is just one HTTP server in Lisp. And finding that took all of 30 seconds in Google.

  • I had a prof who once talked about MULTICS, and mentioned that it had some interesting security features, including (and I'm reaching into the fog of memory here) something to do with grading the possible transmission of information in such subtle ways as someone replying to an email or not replying to an email (ie: regardless of the content of the message, this accounts for one bit of unpredictable information).

    It was also asserted by said prof that MULTICS was shelved so that it wouldn't compete with a proprietary OS by the same company.

    Can anybody shed light on these statements?

  • Re:Nice to See (Score:3)

    by Stiletto ( 12066 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @04:36PM (#908900)
    Would it be a better world if everyone spent years learning enough about car mechanics to be able to strip down and rebuild an engine?

    ACtually, a better analogy would be:

    "Would it be a better world if everyone spent weeks learning enough about a car to operate it safely without bumping into other cars/inanimate objects?"

    Of course, the answer to this is, YES!

    It truely is an ideal world where people have a solid understanding of computers, how they function, and how they are operated. Unfortunately we don't live in that world. We live in a world full of people driving minivans off the road and into telephone poles.

  • UNIX (Score:3)

    by deblau ( 68023 ) <slashdot.25.flickboy@spamgourmet.com> on Monday July 24, 2000 @01:23PM (#908901) Journal
    UNIX were highly respected members of society in Roman times. They were used to protect high-ranking women, as they could almost certainly be trusted to Do The Right Thing. Their history is very interesting reading.

    -- Dave

  • Re:Nice to See (Score:3)

    by Baki ( 72515 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @11:18PM (#908902)
    In line with this analogy:

    It doesn't matter if the OS is complex and only for relatively few to work with it. To normal users the only thing that matters are the end-user applications.

    People learn how to drive a car (end-use app) but not how to fix the engine, in fact with all modern electronics etc that becomes more and more difficult without special equipment etc.

    Likewise, a solid and complex-to-use (for the average end-user) OS is fine, as long as it is a good development environment for the specialists, and as long as there are easy and good end-user applications.

  • Re:Nice to See (Score:3)

    by Loge ( 83167 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @02:07PM (#908903)
    every time I run across something completely inexplicable (to me, anyway) it's always nice to eventually discovered exactly why its implementation was so inscrutable

    Well, except some decisions appear to have been made near-randomly. For example, I recall an interview with Ken Thompson a few years back in which he was asked what he would have done differently if he could design UNIX all over again. His answer? He would have put an "e" at the end of creat().

  • Re:Who cares? (Score:3)

    by mbpomije ( 131606 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @03:00PM (#908904)
    People shouldn't worship technology or turn a programming language into a religion, but this isn't what the article was about. I consider myself to be a UNIX-HATER and would much rather be sitting in front of a LispM.

    However, I thought that this article was a reasonable introduction to what UNIX was about, It had a positive tone, but there wasn't any attempt to distort history, unlike what Eric Raymond does. Actually, if you read the original Kernighan and Mashey 1981 IEEE Computer paper "The Unix Programming Environment", you can see that the original creators of UNIX were trying to create something like the LispM. K&M talked about writing programs in an extensible environment that the user could use combine components together at run time.

    It's just that since the LispM had a much better dynamic programming language than the UNIX shell and a richer variety of types that subprograms could exchange beyond integers and byte streams. This way, the distinction between shell scripts and system programs in C that exists on UNIX was unnecessary and programming on any level of the system was much more pleasant.

    There are some lessons to be taken from the history of UNIX. Flexible, open representations of data and system programmability were steps forward for the time. Of course the LispM had this in spades, but the LispM companies didn't pay attention to the critical component of UNIX's success: Running on commodity hardware!

  • Re:Who cares? (Score:3)

    by JordoCrouse ( 178999 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @01:56PM (#908905) Homepage Journal
    I know guys that worship swords. I know guys that worship cars. I know tons of people who worship their horses (being from Wyoming and all.. please feel free to insert your favorite animal husbandry joke here), and I'll bet you that the old woodsmen worshiped their axes. If you feel truely passionate about something, you admire it, and, of course, you write about it.

    People love to say that Unix is obsolete, becuase they hold on to the notion that their pet project in college is going to turn out to be the Next Big Thing. But the fact of the matter is that nobody, nowhere, under any circumstances have been able to produce an operating system that worked under so many different architectures and situations. End of story.

    And sure, lots of people are making new OSes, and showing them off as "better than Unix", but I'll bet if you took the cover off, you would still see Unix like methods and alogrithms.

    But thats ok, I worship Unix, so thats how I feel. Maybe you should ask Steve Jobs. He just based the entire future of his company on Unix. See if he thinks if it is obsolete....

  • Get it from the horse's mouth (Score:3)

    by spongman ( 182339 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @07:29PM (#908906)
    Denis Ritchie's site [bell-labs.com] is excellent.

    There are some very interesting insights into his work on Unix & C.

    Specifically:
    The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System [bell-labs.com]
    and
    The Development of the C Language [bell-labs.com]

    If you're reading these slashdot articles you should be reading these papers instead!!

    Also check out "The Unix System" by S.R.Bourne.

  • Who cares? (Score:3)

    by Estanislao Martínez ( 203477 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @01:36PM (#908907) Homepage
    People never dedicate attention to the really creative and innovative technologies, like Li sp Machines [uni-hamburg.de], so they're stuck in worshipping truly obsolete systems like Unix.

    But, even worse, worshipping technology in and of itself is stupid. Technology is a tool. Do you worship axes? If you worship computers enough to write a history of an obsolete OS, why not write the history of the axe?

  • UNIX was made to be easy to use (Score:4)

    by Oestergaard ( 3005 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @02:14PM (#908908) Homepage
    ...so they say in the article.

    It's really funny to read stuff like this. I use GNU/Linux because I find it the easiest system to use for the work I do, the freedom part is a nice side effect which have become important to me now that I'm used to it, but freedom was never why I chose the system at first. Besides, why am I talking about freedom when we're talking about UNIX ? Nevermind.

    Read any paper or article where some two-bit reporter mentions UNIX or GNU, and watch him bitching about those complicated commands, ackward syntax, and what not. Now that's a person who never took the half hour it takes a chimpanse to learn the effect of the ``|''. It's almost not funny.

    I'm happy knowing that the system I use is build from the philosophy of making things easy to use. There's just no replacement for ``|'', grep, sed, or their successors. There haven't been in 30 years, and I'd be damn surprised if there was a replacement for this in the next 10 years. Maybe later on, but not in just 10 years. Virtually nothing happens in this industry in 10 years (remember, pipes are from the 50's, they got implemented in the 70's. The wavelet transform is about 100 years old, we still don't use it for streaming media compression)

    The other really funny part is, of course, that the pace of real development -- evolution -- is as slow in this industry as in any other. The time between real breakthroughs is not measured in seconds as some would like us to believe, it's measured in decades. A nice example: If you powered off one of your memory banks on your Multics machine, only the processes living in that memory would die -- even Sun Enterprise series can't do that _today_, you'll have to warn the system of the change first. And people were using toilet-paper for storage those days ! We're 30 years past that, we're about to colonize mars, and our operating systems today can't do what they could 30 years ago.

    Oh, and don't even get me started on the new economy...

  • Re:Nice to See (Score:4)

    by bjrubble ( 129561 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @02:56PM (#908909)
    Why would it be ideal for everyone to have the detailed grounding in computers necessary to use a complex and powerful OS? Would it be a better world if everyone spent years learning enough about car mechanics to be able to strip down and rebuild an engine?

    Okay, I've now had it with this analogy.

    The level of understanding most people have of computers, translated into automotive terms, would not be enough to encompass ideas such as "cars are driven on the street," "tires are less effective when they're wet," and "things in your rearview mirror will look backwards." Most people's interaction with their computer is less like driving a car and more like shouting commands to a barely-competent, intellectually stunted chauffeur. It's not just that they can't rebuild their engine, they don't have *any* understanding of the machine other than that they can sit in it and be taken to the highlighted spots on the map.

    My own analogy would be to history. Obviously it's not necessary in any immediate, practical sense to know the year of the Magna Carta or the Battle of Hastings. And I'm the first to admit that, in school, I thought it ludicrous that I should be expected to know such things. But you know what? There is *meaning* behind those minutiae. History gives you insight into how things work. Without that context, one's view of the contemporary world is massively impoverished. And it's the same for a person whose idea of computers is based on buttons and windows and talking paper clips.

    See all that stuff in there, Homer? That's why your robot never worked.

  • Re:Nice to See (Score:4)

    by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @03:17PM (#908910)

    The level of understanding most people have of computers, translated into automotive terms, would not be enough to encompass ideas such as "cars are driven on the street," "tires are less effective when they're wet," and "things in your rearview mirror will look backwards." Most people's interaction with their computer is less like driving a car and more like shouting commands to a barely-competent, intellectually stunted chauffeur.

    Well, apart from being highly pejorative, this is just a statement of your viewpoint. Unless you could actually back that up with at least some examples, I don't think you're about to convince me or anyone else. It just comes across as prejudice.

    My own analogy would be to history. Obviously it's not necessary in any immediate, practical sense to know the year of the Magna Carta or the Battle of Hastings. And I'm the first to admit that, in school, I thought it ludicrous that I should be expected to know such things. But you know what? There is *meaning* behind those minutiae. History gives you insight into how things work. Without that context, one's view of the contemporary world is massively impoverished.

    Of course there is meaning in history. There is also meaning in the minutiae of current times. There is meaning in romantic novels and the pop songs of Britney Spears (no, really, there is). We all glean meaning from a vast number of sources. I just don't believe we should hold history as a particularly good source of meaning. Why? First because "history" is notorious for being very hard to get right - whose history do you trust? Secondly, history is by its nature very specific to particular time periods, and it can often be highly misleading when applied to modern times. Just ask the Israelis, Palestinians or anyone in Northern Ireland about how clinging to history can be a bloody and unproductive activity.

    And it's the same for a person whose idea of computers is based on buttons and windows and talking paper clips.

    No, modern GUIs really are made of windows and buttons. These objects are real in the context of the UI. This is exactly what makes computers so powerful - if I make a world of buttons and windows and menus, then those objects are precisely real. Computers are infinitely flexible processing machines that can simulate any reality to whatever degree of accuracy the programmer wants to create.

    If you believe that the commands a CLI system understands are any more or less real than the widgets of a GUI then I would highly recommend you go back to first principles and actually learn some of the very computer science principles we are debating :-)

  • Bell Labs is not a disinterested party. (Score:4)

    by Schnedt McWapt ( 195938 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @01:59PM (#908911)
    It's worthwhile to visit the Bell Labs site and read their take on the history of Unix. It's important, though, to bear in mind that they are NOT a disinterested party in the history. In fact, they were a strong force, especially in the middle years, in trying to force Unix to remain a proprietary OS. Read A Quarter Century of UNIX by Peter H. Salus, Addison-Wesley, 1994, ISBN 0-201-54777-5 for a much less biased and more complete history. It's an expensive paperback but I've never regretted adding it to my shelf.

  • Nice to See (Score:4)

    by rockwall ( 213803 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @01:28PM (#908912)
    Hey, as far as I'm concerned, anything that reminds us of our roots -- computing or otherwise -- is great. An "easy-to-use" OS is a fine solution to a real-world problem, but imagine the ideal: everyone is able to use a real OS because everyone has a grounding in computers and how they work. At the very least, entertaining and interesting histories such as this are a step in the right direction.

    Here are a couple other histories of Unix; check 'em out. Learn something. Return to your roots.

    http://crackmonkey.org/unix.html [crackmonkey.org]
    http://www.uwsg.iu.ed u/usail/external/recommended/unixhx.html [iu.edu]
    http://www.hsrl.rutgers.edu/ug/uni x_history.html [rutgers.edu]

    A quick final note, but if there's one thing I love about Unix histories, it's the explanation factor. I mean, every time I run across something completely inexplicable (to me, anyway) it's always nice to eventually discovered exactly why its implementation was so inscrutable. At least there was a method to the madness. Usually. :)

    yours,
    john

  • Re:Nice to See (Score:5)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @02:06PM (#908913) Homepage
    It seems to me that the biggest change in Unix in the past decade is that people are tring hard to get away from the core philosophy. One of thouse cores is "Write programs that do one thing and do it well."

    As McIlroy quoted "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.'"

    About the only place I see this going on in modern program design is the mp3 players and that is a result of the people who do good UI work generaly don't have the skill set to do the MP3 decoding so they link to something like mpg123.

    Another quote: "Cognitive engineering" is what Condon called it, "...that the black box should be simple enough such that when you form the model of what's going on in the black box, that's in fact what is going on in the black box."

    Based on one of the major ideas in Unix, why does every program grow till it can read mail? I don't think I've ever seen a program that uses /bin/mail as an interface after the first version of mailx. /bin/mail knows how to do everything it needs involving getting a message and sending mail and the "difficult problem" of properly locking mailboxes.

    I also like the bit about fixing the code so they didn't have to document the uglyness. Now that might be the best reason I've ever heard to properly document a program.

  • Re:Nice to See (Score:5)

    by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Monday July 24, 2000 @01:54PM (#908914)

    Hey, as far as I'm concerned, anything that reminds us of our roots -- computing or otherwise -- is great.

    Interesting, but don't the "roots" at some point become so distant as to be irrelevant? Isn't it better to look forwards, solving the problems of today and tomorrow, than to stay in the past constantly trying to re-solve old and obsolete problems?

    An "easy-to-use" OS is a fine solution to a real-world problem, but imagine the ideal: everyone is able to use a real OS because everyone has a grounding in computers and how they work. At the very least, entertaining and interesting histories such as this are a step in the right direction.

    I have to disagree with this. Why would it be ideal for everyone to have the detailed grounding in computers necessary to use a complex and powerful OS? Would it be a better world if everyone spent years learning enough about car mechanics to be able to strip down and rebuild an engine? No, it would be an enormous waste of time; time that could be better spent (for most people) learning other knowledge. We need well trained car mechanics, but only a fairly limited number. Similarly, I don't think 3-5 years of intensive training in the basics of computer science would be a sensible use of most people's limited time.

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