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Unix Operating Systems Software

UNIX hits the Big Three-Oh 239

Posted by chrisd from the happy-birthday-there-big-fella dept.
sparcv9 writes: "If you scope the timeline over at Éric Lévénez's site, you'll see that today, November 3rd, is the 30th birthday of the UNIX Time-Sharing System V1. The Open Group's UNIX history describes the features of Version 1 as having an "assembler for a PDP-11/20, file system, fork(), roff and ed. It was used for text processing of patent documents." We've come a long way in just three decades."
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UNIX hits the Big Three-Oh More

UNIX hits the Big Three-Oh

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  • Need I say more?
  • 30 Years and we are finally getting it right. Do you think it was the 30 years of software refineing or just the fact that the hardware has cought up to what we wanted the software to be?

    • Re:wow older than I am (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dragons_flight ( 515217 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:37PM (#2517594) Homepage
      Well MS-Dos 1.0 was created in 1981 [computerhope.com], and Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 [computerhope.com], so I'd say UNIX hasn't come as far or as fast as it could have.

      The real question then might be: Who fell asleep and let Bill take over the world?
      • If UNIX had come out in the 80's it would be exactly where it is today. Yes its older, but if DOS had come out in the 70's it would have progressed at the same pace as UNIX did from 1970 to 1980, look at what we had to run on then.

        And as for UNIX not going far enough, have you used Mac OS X? This is UNIX on crack, smack and PCP. It is the best version of Unix on the market today with respect for your average computer user. It's far more user friendly than Linux and more advanced than Windows. Other versions of Unix offer anything OS X is missing.

        So what isn't found in Unix between the commercial Unix version, Linux and Mac OS X that you think needs to be there?

      • Re:wow older than I am (Score:4, Flamebait)

        by klund ( 53347 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:51PM (#2517627)
        and Windows 1.0 was released in 1985

        Yes, and according to your link, "Microsoft Windows was announced November, 1983" but wasn't actually released until November 1985.

        TWO YEARS of amazing Microsoft VaporWare(tm), and the marketing machine still rolls on, flattening all in its path. It's the one thing that UNIX has never figured out how to do... even in thirty years...
      • I think you are confuseing "getting it right" with "fitting the lowest common denominator" Just because McDonalds sold the most hamburgers does not by any stretch of the imagination make them the best restraunt.
      • Who fell asleep and let Bill take over the world?

        AT&T :) Speaking of which, I think a Microsoft phone company would have sort of a ring to it: "Microsoft Bell"

        Enough cheap puns for now...
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Gotta love the irony of it (Score:3, Funny)

    by no parity ( 448151 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:20PM (#2517542)
    Everyone of us hates patents, yet loves a system that was born out of the needs of processing patent applications.

    • Actually, no. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      Not "everyone of us" hates patents.

      I don't. Patents are one of the most useful and benificial tools of the technological age.

      I DO dearly hate the missuse and total bastardization of the patent concept that we now see applied, for instance the application of the patent concept to pure IP, like operating systems.

      KFG
      • I'd be tempted to agree if "technical age" was changed to "industrial age".

        -Paul Komarek
      • for a long time, I thought. "Patents aren't a bad idea, it's just the implementation sucks". - But then I thought about it a bit. According to lore, patents were originally intended to foster innovation by exchanging a time-limited monopoly for full disclosure of the workings of an invention. But, why do it that way? The normal way for governments to interefere with that sort of thing is through the imposition of taxes, not some half-baked limited monopoly scheme. If governments had _really_ wanted to encourage innovation through full disclosure, then they should have placed a 50% tax on any proprietary products!

        Clearly, encouragement of innovation was never _really_ the primary motive of the patent system, whatever the constitution says...
        • If governments had _really_ wanted to encourage innovation through full disclosure, then they should have placed a 50% tax on any proprietary products

          Great idea for encouraging innovation -- in the surrounding countries, who would reap the benefits of the brain drain this would inevitably cause. Do you even run your ideas through your head before suggesting them?
    • Actually, the very first barely-Unix system was built so that Bell Labs engineers could play video games.

      This patent processing machine came later, and might have been the first mature system, but it technically wasn't first, just a short interlude in the bigger picture.

      That make you feel better? :-)

  • changed my mind (Score:2, Redundant)

    by slittle ( 4150 )
    It was used for text processing of patent documents

    Unix is obviously evil.
    • Moderation Totals: Troll=1

      Jesus, who pissed in your wheaties this morning?! Desperate attempt at humor/smartass remark != troll...
      • I wonder if people are confusing Pascal's ":=" with "!=". That would explain a lot of the troll moderators...
    • Just think of UNIX as trying to make up for its evil past by hosting such fine patent flaming sites as Slashdot. :-)

      Besides, everyone already knows which OS is REALLY the evil one.
      __

      The question is not where do I want to go today, but where have all my credit card numbers, p0rn website passwords, and naked doggie sex pictures gone?

      • Re:Neither good nor evil (Score:2, Interesting)

        by slittle ( 4150 )
        But that other OS would... 'forget' patents at random. Hmm... perhaps instead instead of patents expiring after 20 years, they should expire by act of lottery?
  • Looking at this really brought back some memories. I remember recieving the first edition of the famed "Unix Programmers Guide" by K. Thompson and D.M. Ritchie. It was released November 3, 1971. The guide included over 60 commands including famous ones like boot, chmod, mv, cp, and ls. If only I still had it today...

    Does anybody have the original programming manuel? It is indeed a classic piece of memorabilia to own especially if you're a Unix fan.
  • I usually complain about huge pictures on websites.

    Lucky for us it wasn't PDF... ;-)

  • Blast from the Past (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:24PM (#2517548) Homepage Journal
    Reading the UNIX family tree was like a walk down memory lane. Some people can hear a song and remember what it was like way back then, when we were young and crazy. I found myself reading the chart, going down the UNIX genealogy, drifting back to the AT&T 3B2 in the basement of Holmes Hall (Michigan State) back in 1986. Or I found myself in an apartment in the summer of 1993, with Linux 0.97pl4 installed on my 386sx. Or I found myself arguing with my boss that this Linux thing would really take off someday. Of course, it did, and my boss was an idiot. (You know who you are!) That was Linux 1.0.

    Wow, that was fun.
  • At least according the the article I'm looking at in myt hand that was published by D.M Ritchie and K/ Thompson in the Bell Labs Technical Journal, July-August 1978.

    • Re:The earliest UNIX systems is circa 1969-70 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bihoy ( 100694 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:56PM (#2517643)

      Here are the first few paragraphs from The Bell System Technical Journal article entitled "The UNIX Time-sharing System", by D.M. Ritchie and K. Thompson (manuscript received April 3, 1978)

      UNIX has certainly come a long way from these meager beginings.

      UNIX is a general-purpose, multi-user, interactive operating system for the larger Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 and the Interdata 8/32 computers, including

      (i) A heirarchical file system incorporating demountable volumes,

      (ii) Compatible file, device, and inter-process I/O,

      (iii) The ability to initiate asynchronous processes,

      (iv) System command language selectable on a per-user basis,

      (v) Over 100 subsystems including a dozen languages,

      (vi) High degree of portability.

      This paper discusses the nature and implication of the file system and of the user command interface.

      I. Introduction

      There have been four versions of the UNIX time-sharing system. The earliset (circa 1969-70) ran on the Digital Corporation PDP-7 and -9 computers. The second version ran on the unprotected PDP-11/20 computer. The third incoporated mutliprogramming and ran on the PDP-11/34, /40, /45, /60, and /70 computers; it is the one described in the previously published version of this paper, and is also the most widely used today. This paper describes only the fourth, current system that runs on the PDP-11/70 and the Interdata 8/32 computers. In fact, the differences among the various systems is rather small; most of the revisions made to the originally published version of this paper, aside from those concerned with style, had to do with details of the implementation of the file system.

      Since PDP-11 UNIX became operational in February, 1971, over 600 installations have been put into service. Most of them are engaged in applications such as computers scince education, the preperation and formatting of documents and other textual material, the collection and processing of trouble data from various switching machines within the Bell System, and recording and checking telephone service orders. our own installation is used mainly for other topics in computer science, and also for documentation perparation.

  • No!!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by reynaert ( 264437 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:26PM (#2517556)
    Unix... used... for processing patents?!? No! That can't be! Patents are evil! Unix is good! Unix can't be evil! ...Can it?

    I have to hurry...
    rm -rf /* ....
    OK I'm saved now...

    But what OS should I use now? MacOS X is Unix... BeOS is kind of Unix... What else's left? Windows XP... No, it can't be... There has to be something else... Oh God, don't do this to me!!!
    • Well, there's Palm OS....

      • OT (Score:2)

        by dimator ( 71399 )
        If I say it's safe to surf this beach, Captain, it's safe to surf this beach.

        Apocalypse Now, right? Recently saw it... wierd, wierd, disturbed movie. Really awesome characters/actors though, and Colonel Kilgore ranks at the top.
    • How true. Nowdays, if someone mentions the word computer I conjure up images of either some big box humming away somewhere with a UNIX prompt, or a Windows desktop machine.

      Am I the only person who thinks this is kinda scarey?

      In the machine room, OpenVMS is 'technically' alive, but I don't hear stories of massive new OpenVMS installations, and the VAX line is on its last legs. You've still got a few mainframe operating systems still around (MVS, etc...), but IBM seems to be moving in the direction of partitioned linux installations.

      On the desktop IBM's managerial stupidity killed OS/2, Apple has made MacOS into just a BSD shell...for whatever reason, BeOS is dead for whatever reason (but it was pretty UNIXy anyway).

      Whatever happened to all the diversity? I don't think you could blame that _all_ on Microsoft - they're the sole surviving company hawking a non-UNIX operating system.

      WTF's up with that?
      • You can't blame to current homogeneity of computers at all on Microsoft - they are the 'rebel' in the industry and the only company which has resisted Unix (though, barely: Windows is barely non-Unix. Hasn't at least one version of Windows been certified POSIX compliant?)

        When you look at something like NetBSD, which runs on something like two dozen different architectures, that's the definition of homogeneity. Unix is definitely the originator of 'open systems' which is precisely what killed the diverse lineup of mainframes in the 80's and 90's.

        You can also look at this from the hardware side, which has also gotten homogeneous.

        Of course, homogeneity isn't all bad. Standardization significantly improves competition, thus improving quality and lowering price.
      • If OS/2 was really dying, I am pretty sure IBM would have opensourced it as a final fsck-you to Microsoft. My guess is that they know it still rocks, and are just waiting for Microsoft to lose their strangehold on the commercial intel-based desktop os market. OS/2 could still become the comeback kid.

        If I have understood things correctly, OS/2 was what OSX tries to be - an efficent and userfriendly operating system with a solid text-based washboard underbelly. BeOS too, for that matter.

  • How far have we come (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sketerpot ( 454020 ) <sketerpot@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:27PM (#2517559)
    It's been 30 years. How far has UNIX (or some workalike) come since then? I know we have the internet as a common thing, and UN*X has been moved to a side of the computer market by Windows, even with shockingly crazy technology (they still use drive letters!), but a lot of smart people have made cool things for UN*X.

    And lastly, where is it going?

    • Re:How far have we come (Score:4, Funny)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @09:26PM (#2517701)
      "And lastly, where is it going?"

      Where would you like to go today?

      KFG
    • It's been 30 years. How far has UNIX (or some workalike) come since then? I know we have the internet as a common thing, and UN*X has been moved to a side of the computer market by Windows, even with shockingly crazy technology (they still use drive letters!), but a lot of smart people have made cool things for UN*X.

      Let me see-- Mac OS X is a good description of how far we have come. Sure Linux and FreeBSD are good expressions too but one is not reminded of it as quickly as one is with Mac OS X...

  • what HAVE we done? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by metalhed77 ( 250273 )
    unix hasn't changed significantly over the years in terms of the base concepts behind it. Is this a good thing or a bad thing. I don't really know. Are we restricting ourselves by staying with antiquated concepts? or are we creating something great with a proven system.
    • The wheel hasn't changed significantly over the years in terms of the base concepts behind it. Is this a good thing or a bad thing. I don't really know. Are we restricting ourselves by staying with antiquated concepts? or are we creating something great with a proven system.

      • Its a good thing AND a bad thing. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Sunday November 04, 2001 @07:08AM (#2518423)
        The wheel hasn't changed significantly over the years in terms of the base concepts behind it. Is this a good thing or a bad thing.

        Its postive:
        * Unix is easily the most reliable popular desktop, or server Operating System. Uptimes can and have been measured in years
        * Modern Unix (of which Linux is the standard, but keep that low for now) is open, uses documented APIs, and provides users with great choice and flexibility as to how their machines work
        * I've got high standard, and the ability to reconfigure a machine for say to day maintenace tasks without rebooting is in my opinion a standard part of any real server OS.
        * Despite what most Slashdotters think, a modern Unix machine is capable of being used and administered entirely through its GUI or via the scripting-happy command line.

        * Root sucks or rather, relying on one particular account to be the sole administrator sucks, and this si what most Unixes do. That stems from another problem
        * RWX permissions suck. There's good replacements that work well and are just as easy to administer, but Linux, most BSDs, and many proprietary Unixes still use dodgy permissions which weren't desgned for security. Not being able to have any kind of fine grained control over who has access to a file sucks.
        * lack of standardization hurts the platform. GNOME versus KDE hurts by dividing effort more than it helps by providing competition .A GNOME app under KDE still feels like...a GNOME app under KDE. Red Carpet is a brilliant ap but it acts differently from all the other KDE apps on my desktop. That really sucks. Standardization will hurt lots. The LSB settled on the RPM packaging system, told distros not to put things in /opt, and said init scripts must live in /etc/init.d. Some distros who had minor things to change have modified the way they are, but expect screaming when someone dare suggests the non-RPM distros convert.
    • Three things spring to mind after reading your comment:

      Good thing the Egyptians didn't stand around worrying whether or not the pyramids could be built until some unforseen technological change came along

      Necessity is the mother of invention

      No matter where you go, there you are

      So in answer to your two questions I would say, "yes" and "yes"! :)

      LEXX

    • Well, the internal combustion engine hasn't really changed a lot since it was first developed either. Sometimes, systems built of small, simple, reliable components really can go the distance.

      OTOH, future computers (say, 20 years from now) will likely have to deal with quantum processing hardware (no, this is not Star Trek). Since there will be a fundamental shift in the way we design algorithms for chips that work with Qbits, we may need a fundamental shift in the operating system too.

  • well, how about that (Score:5, Funny)

    by Raleel ( 30913 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:32PM (#2517575)
    I turned 30 today as well...and I'm a unix admin...go figure

  • more than half the life of commercial computing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mendax Veritas ( 100454 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:34PM (#2517584) Homepage
    Interesting to realize that Unix has been in use for more than half the lifetime of the commercial computer industry. Unix is 30 ("born" 1971); commercial computing goes back only another <=20 years, to the early '50s. This is sort of cool, as it shows how flexible and open-ended the basic Unix concept was, that it has managed to evolve and remain useful all this time.

  • Happy Birthday! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:35PM (#2517589) Homepage Journal
    I work on the helpdesk of a mid-sized ISP, and we use FreeBSD for just about everything. A while back I was going through three-year-old modem logs looking for records of someone dialing in (billing dispute): grep for the UID, piped to awk to add up the time online, convert it to hours and print it out, piped to sendmail to mail it to the billing dept (Hi Mary!). Suddenly it struck me just how powerful this all was: one (relatively) small tool piped into another, using simple plain ol' text.

    You can't do that with in WIMP environments, God bless 'em (how do you script a mouse movement?). You can't do that without a lot of people all sharing their work. You can't do that, in other words, without Unix. I was this close to dashing off a fan letter to Thompson and Ritchie before I stopped myself (I'm sure they've heard it before). Yes, I know Unix is a lot more than T&R, but it was either that or spam everyone who'd ever written a utility.

    Anyhow...just a note, if they're maybe reading this, to say thanks very much. Like I read somewhere else and promptly ripped off:

    Unix soit qui mal y pense.

    • (how do you script a mouse movement?)

      "set the position of the mouse to (0, 30)"

      Assuming you've got the appropriate AppleScript extension, of course. Mac OS X is cool.

    • Ahh Pipes, the plastic of the Unix world.
    • I have to admit you had me fooled there - I though "Unix soit qui mal y pense" actually made sense and my french skills weren't good enough to decipher it. Then I looked on e2 and found 'Honi soit qui mal y pense [everything2.com]' - 'Shame to him who thinks evil of this'. So you are saying that anyone who thinks evil of some unspecified thing ('this', to be replaced by the most likely subject from the context) is or should be Unix.

      In this context, it's not as bad - it's only saying that people who think badly of unix should be unix (now if you replaced that with should be converted to unix or something like that it might work) - but you should be careful about using quotes if you don't understand them completely.
      • Well, obviously anyone who thinks poorly of Unix should be made a eunuch. In a few generation's time imagine how much better the world might be. Although the suspender manufacturers, beard-oil makers and tobacconists might possibly then rule the world:-)

        I'm a Unix admin, naturally.

    • wimp enviornments (Score:4, Funny)

      by archen ( 447353 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @11:06PM (#2517863)
      You can't do that with in WIMP environments, God bless 'em (how do you script a mouse movement?)


      The mouse has pretty good functinoality. For everything else, there's Perl.

    • Good point. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by einhverfr ( 238914 ) <chris.traversNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday November 04, 2001 @12:42AM (#2517991) Homepage Journal
      You have hit on something important, I think. WIMPS are great and very powerful (compare Mozilla to Lynx for a moment before you become hostilt to the WIMP). This is particularly useful when the human is receiving the majority of the information and the commands given to the system are simple (go here, select that, and so on). The information density is great for the human but lacking for the computer.

      However, CLI's are the best way to hand complex instructions to a computer. The information density is great for the computer (you can send a lot of information to the computer very concisely) but not so great for the human. So if I want to view a simple report of activity in my log files, WIMPs are wonderful, but if I want to do more complex data-mining, I will have to add some command line functionality (a CLI of sorts...).

      Horses for courses. And Happy BDay UNIX!
    • Incidently, I don't think it was Thompson or Ritchie who came up with the modern pipe. But I may be confused. At the very least, someone besides these two suggested infix notation -- for pipes or for command args, I'm not sure -- and Ritchie claims that niether he nor Thompson saw the light until much later.

      As far as WIMP interfaces versus command lines, I think there is an easy explanation for why power users prefer command lines. Think of WIMP interfaces as akin to heiroglyphics or other picture-writing, and command lines as an approximation to natural language.

      There's a reason nobody uses picture-writing today, including lack of flexibility and power and inefficiency. I'm not sure that we'll ever want a real "natural language interface", because I don't think the natural language facilities in humans are really up to casually conversing precise ideas. In the end, you might as well have a specialized command language. Of course, "smart" computers could make assumptions about what we mean to say, but we hate it when humans do that.

      -Paul Komarek

    • That's not Unix specific (Score:3, Informative)

      by Nailer ( 69468 )
      A while back I was going through three-year-old modem logs looking for records of someone dialing in (billing dispute): grep for the UID, piped to awk to add up the time online, convert it to hours and print it out, piped to sendmail to mail it to the billing dept...

      You can't do that with in WIMP environments, God bless 'em

      Why not? Most GUI environments have had scripting capabilities to do this for a while, Windows has been able to do this task for around for years, and I'm sure Apple scripting language (not sure of its name - Applescript sounds obvious) can do it too.

      What's Unix specific about it? Scripting rocks, but its hardly unique.
  • Back in my day, we didn't even have fork(). We only had spoon().

  • forking (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kiro ( 220724 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @08:42PM (#2517601)
    fork ()

    GCC error: The Oracle says, there is no fork

    .

  • One way was easier.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by marijnm ( 454978 )
    I'm wondering, WIMP stuff has made computers easier to use, but not more powerful. Are there any examples of (possibly failed) systems that are more powerful than UNIX?

    (yeah, you could argue about the meaning of 'powerful', but you know what I mean)

    Marijn
    • Check out ITS [tuxedo.org]. The source code is available here [mit.edu], and you can grab the documentation over here. [mit.edu]
      • Hmm... I don't know if ITS is the future. And good luck getting it to compile. Though I suppose you could get a PDP 10 emulator... Even with the 36 bit emulation it would still probably run faster than the original.

        I think you'd find it lacking. Maybe you'd end up a Unix hater [catalog.com], though.

        noah

        • I tried to get it running a year ago, but all the emulators I could find were under development and unavailable. A new search today revealed an interesting site [aracnet.com] about PDP-10 emulation with instructions for TOPS-10, TOPS-20 and, yes, ITS [cosmic.com]. I'm going to have fun this week.
    • In fact UNIX is a pun on MULTICS.
      UNIX is much smaller and simpler.
      • Oh, MULTICS was terrible! You could hardly even consider it multiuser. It was a good OS for the time, but UNIX killed.

        I guess a way to look at it is UNIX is still going strong while Honeywell, which made multics, now does other stuff.

    • Re:One way was easier.... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mihalis ( 28146 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @11:04PM (#2517862) Homepage

      The obvious answer is Multics. Unix was a pun on Multics since it was originally a single-user OS in its earliest days. The original authors needed something less ambitious that could fit into the small computer they had to play with. Although the scale of unix systems eventually greatly exceeded any known Multics system, there is still some inherent architectural "heft" in Multics that Unix never had (never needed?). It's almost pure theology now, but you did ask. More info at Multicians.org [multicians.org] I believe.

    • Re:One way was easier.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by scrytch ( 9198 ) <chuck@myrealbox.com> on Sunday November 04, 2001 @11:49AM (#2518886)
      Are there any examples of (possibly failed) systems that are more powerful than UNIX?

      Well the obvious question to your question is "for what?". Mainframes have been doing something like vmware for ages, had hugely advanced (and yes, crufty) networking protocols, record-oriented files, and I/O so well tuned it would make a strong webmaster cry. About the same time Unix was announced to the world, another OS built on capabilities security came out, but languished. VMS is built around async I/O from the ground up. NT inherits that I/O from VMS, and just about every kernel object can be inspected and given ACL's.

      Mainframes also had a huge cost and came with the IBM monkey on your back, VMS only ran on DEC boxen, NT got features slapped on it that degraded its stability, and Unix was nearly free to start (AT&T was under a consent decree and basically couldn't be in the software business), completely free soon after, and portable to the campus toaster ovens. Unix had an evolutionary advantage similar to the ones humans enjoy: it could live anywhere.
  • That that timetime was the work of a script and *not* hand-designed. :)

  • There goes my installation (Score:4, Funny)

    by Engelbot ( 24601 ) <adamNO@SPAMtellumo.net> on Saturday November 03, 2001 @09:21PM (#2517688) Homepage
    "We have a saying in the movement that you can't trust anybody over 30."


    --Jack Weinberg, 1964
    Well, great. Now I'll have to install a new OS . . .
  • I could have sworn I saw this here (maybe as a sig, dunno).

    "At the current rate of development of the windows/dos environment Microsoft will eventually invent unix."

    So, what, another 15 more years or so?

    Will it be called the GallBatesmer *nix distro?
  • fork(), roff, and ed?


    Those patent guys used to use that system?


    Bring some of those guys back...people reviewing patents these days need some training!


    Sheesh!

  • yay! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ducktape ( 178839 )
    happy birthday unix! coincedentally, nov.3 == 365 days uptime for my unix machine!!
  • I love that UNIX timeline, I probably visit that page once a month. I did, however, notice that unlike most other unices on the page, the Cray UNICOS OS entry hasn't been updated to reflect recent versions. Cray has always been conservative with their numbering scheme, often heavily padding the numbers with zeros (current release of UNICOS is 10.0.1.0 with 11.0 coming soon). Would be nice to see minor updates such as with UNICOS releases reflected on the timeline as well. (UNICOS updates are no more frequent than linux kernel updates and are generally just as significant).
  • reading all these coments just makes me feel old.I used Unix on a PDP11 back in the early eighties when I was a fresh young development engineer. God ! I hated it. VMS was a lot more complete..... but UNix is still going.
  • ROCK ON!!!

  • The writing is on the wall... (Score:4, Funny)

    by MrHat ( 102062 ) on Saturday November 03, 2001 @11:18PM (#2517877)

    UNIX must be next. Slashdot said so.

    Unless Slashdot's dying too. Then I may have to leave the basement. And that would suck.

  • Just voted on /. poll, Halloween is my birthday. Im 3 days older than unix. Now I feel REALLY old.

    -
    The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a little. - Joe Martin, Porterfield

  • How to draw timelines and other graphs (Score:4, Informative)

    by GGardner ( 97375 ) on Sunday November 04, 2001 @01:18AM (#2518042)
    This groovy timeline was probably drawn with the graphviz package, which is probably the coolest download you've never heard of:

    graphviz [att.com]

  • This is great news! In just a few more years, UNIX will be old enough to be elected president!
  • Aw main()!

    any comments about me being old, and I'll tell you to fork(roff).

    You know you've been doing this too long when your manager says "to keep him in the loop" and you ask "for or do while?".

    (sigh)

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