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."
Re:Future (Score:5, Funny)
I can see some form of UNIX making it to the 22nd century and beyond.
+1 Forth-sightful
Re:Future (Score:5, Funny)
Re:user experience (Score:5, Funny)
Unix is perfectly user friendly, it's just careful who it is friends with.
So basically what AT&T still does with Android (Score:4, Funny)
'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.'
Re:Future (Score:5, Funny)
Is that a Sunday?
Re:The heydays ended ten years ago (Score:3, Funny)
Several OSes are UNIX, including Mac OS and Solaris.
Right, of course, I had *totally* forgotten that MacOS and Solaris were binary compatible. My bad.
Good thing I didn't confuse the terms "Unix" and "POSIX compliant". That would have been embarrasing.
Re:So THEY invented "RTFM!" (Score:3, Funny)
You should be aware that RTFM hasa different meaning in the Windows world: Reboot The Fucking Machine
Re:Future (Score:4, Funny)
Not sure, but the restaurant out there is open 24/7.