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Unix Operating Systems Software

Ken Thompson Receives Kanai Award 61

Posted by CmdrTaco from the how-much-is-20-million-yen-anyway dept.
JerseyTom writes "Ken Thompson, co-creator of UNIX gets the first Tsutomu Kanai Award which includes a 20-million yen grant from Hitachi Ltd. " Silly me, I thought Unix was obsolete. Guess I was wrong *grin*.
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Ken Thompson Receives Kanai Award More

Ken Thompson Receives Kanai Award

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  • Unix not obsolete, just boring (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    computer science, much like mathematics, doesn't change drastically
    but rather it evolves slowly over time. new advances usually add
    to the knowledge base, not replace it. while calculus was an
    extremely valueable addition to mathematics it certainly didn't
    supersede algebra or geometry just like object-oriented
    programming didn't supersede other philosophies like structural or
    functional programming but rather enhanced the general tool set of
    computer science. as long as computers remain functionally the same
    i don't see why a language such as c would no longer be needed. sure you could
    design a new language, but if it was at the same abstraction level as c, ultimately it would need to be able to describe the same tasks that c already does, thus just resulting in a new syntax. programming languages really only differ in abstraction level and support for different design philosophies.

  • Unix not obsolete, just boring (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How about:
    Alan Turing, inventor of Turing machines or Church that created lambda calculus. They were both 20 th centaurians mathematicans. One example of mathematic from our century: Chaos theory, signal analysis, fractals and not forgetting many of the fundamentals that computers are based on.
  • No, but he did discover some of the software Al-Gore-rithyms used in Unix.
  • Im not familiar with Plan9, does anyone have some good links (technically oriented) to read? Thanks
  • I'm not familiar with Plan9, does anyone have some good links (technically oriented) to read? Thanks

    Check out the Inferno FAQ [lucent-inferno.com]. You may have to search for "Plan 9" in the text.

    --

  • What I remember from "Life with UNIX: A guide for everyone" is that they didn't know by the time that software patents were possible, so he registered the patent (of the setUID mechanism) as an analogous hardware device.
  • Why did this get a -1 score?

    --
  • OS X isn't A/UX, it's Rhapsody, which is in turn NeXTSTEP. Of course, I'm no expert on NeXTSTEP and it is entirely possible that it is a derivative of A/UX, but I don't think so because it's all 4.4 BSD-ish and Mach microkernely and stuff.

    Plus I severely, *severely* doubt Steve Jobs would have used anything Apple-derived at NeXT given the circumstances under which it was created.

    --
  • The 20 million yen / $166k didn't go to Thompson, that was the total endowment of the award!

    "The award, endowed with a 20-million yen grant from Hitachi Ltd. in 1995, was established in honor of Dr. Kanai, who joined Hitachi as a researcher in 1958 and retires as president this month."

    It's nice that he gets honors like this, and the National Medal of Technology that he and Ritchie will recieve from Clinton next month, but it'd be nice if someone gave him a cash award, too. I'd thought it'd finally happened. Alas.

  • The famous one is for the SETUID bit mechanism -- first software patent I ever heard of, way back when. Fortunately Bell Labs assigned this patent to the public domain almost immediately, so it never hurt anyone.

  • What about Graph theory? There are some modern 20th century advances in graph theory..

  • What does "old" have to do with obsolete? Any OS out of Redmond is more obsolete than Unix, as long as billborg sets its major design goal to be different from everything else so he can daydream about staying in control.

    Technology doesn't become obsolete just by aging.

    --

  • what? (Score:1)

    by prok ( 8502 )
    OS X is _not_ based on A/UX. It's based on NeXTSTEP. Having run both A/UX and NeXTSTEP (on black hardware), I can tell you that they have very little in common. (other than both being unices) A/UX is a pile of crap, NeXTSTEP is nifty.
  • One of my AT&T UNIX books has a reprint of a software patent. Unfortunately it is packed away in a box. I believe it was for the user/group/other file permission scheme. The patent was put into the public domain.

  • My understanding is that OS/X runs MacOS applications much the same way A/UX did. (That's the "Blue Box", I think.) But that has more to do with hooks built into the MacOS than the Unix side of things.

    A/UX was a System V port to Apple's 68K hardware, so it's definately not the same as NextStep/OSX
    --
  • UCC rules! I get it in my mail everyday so I can tell what the equivalent of US $0.02 is in yen...;)

    -lx

  • According to the article he holds 6 software patents. How dare he! He must be ignorant, according to many slashdotters. The thought that he might want to make a little money off of his good work. He is denying you freedom by creating anything that isn't 'free software', according to RMS. It must be detrimental to society, right?

    In all seriousness. For all the talk of innovation in 'free software', I find that it doesn't keep pace with even Bell Labs.

    PS: Where is the GPL'd Plan9 equivelent?
  • Just to let you know... MAC OS 10 will have NextSTEP functionality integrated into it, including remote access stuff. Maybe this will rival NT.... Linux even.

  • Huh? (Score:1)

    by jerodd ( 13818 )
    OS X is not NeXTStep--it's more like 4.4BSD with that phun Microkernel stuff from CMU thrown in. If it's NeXTSTEP, where's the incredible graphical environment you got on the NeXTS?
  • Plan 9 is based on 3 ideas: all resources are files referred to by the same file-name-space; (2) a filesystem can be added to the file name space at an arbitrary point via the mount command; (3) the file name space is customizable on a per-process basis.
    The first 2 ideas come straight from Unix. The third idea seems to be a genuine advance, and Linux simply does *not* have it. in fact, to benefit from this third idea, you would probably have to rewrite most of Linux and its apps--it is not just something you can add to Linux-- and it really does seem like a good idea that should be included in all new serious operating systems from now on. especially in a networked environment, it confers a useful kind of flexibility. Plan 9 is not change for changes sake or change for the software-owners sake a la Microsoft and other software vendors. it is an honest attempt to improve the way people use computers.
  • Unix is still valiantly holding on in it's fight to remain dead.

    Cheddar Cheese
  • This is technology, not art. If it's mediocre, we toss it aside. If it good, we incrementally improve it. If it's fantastic, we don't improve it. Unix and C/C++ work well, so we incrementally improve them. We don't toss them out simply because they are old.

    Do we need a new OS or language every year?
  • On the subject of patents, there's an interesting article, Patent Reform Is Not Enough [gnu.org] over at the GNU [gnu.org] webserver. It's a reprint and it appeared originally in the GNU's Bulletin vol.1 no.13 (June 1992).

  • Huh? (Score:1)

    by erb ( 24536 )
    This one? [apple.com]

    Sure, they went out of their way to make it look more like MacOS 8, but its still largely the same.
  • Gee, I wonder how long until MS invents a true pre-emptive multitasking, multi-user OS? The worls will just have to wait and see.

    What, Windows Terminal Server [microsoft.com] doesn't count? It's multi-user, sort of.
  • Plan9 is not even being developed by Bell any more. The most recent FAQ is over a year old, and as for Brazil, the next release of Plan9, they say: "Work on Brazil has been stalled, as the developers have been pulled off the Brazil project to work on Inferno. The system is not in a state that is releasable, so there probably won't be a Brazil release in the foreseeable future." This is the OS of choice for grandaddy uber-geeks? :/
  • UNIX will still be obsolete thirty years from now. You will still have the requisite press announcements of UNIX's demise.
    AT&T ownned it and couldn't kill it. Microsoft can't kill it. IBM/TransMeta will not kill it.

    by daywalker: Al-Gore-rithyms -- priceless
  • To get an idea of how slow, do you know *any* mathematics from the 20th century? Fundamental advances are *hard* and do not happen that often.
  • >A good unix-compatible but newer-implemented OS will come along rather soon (I hope) and kill all others.
    At the moment, that OS *is* Linux. AT&T has always diligently protected the trademark UNIX. There was a long and bitter battle between Berkeley and AT&T over the independently derived BSD Un*x. Linux is an independent implementation of the Un*x standard. Because of the trademark and copyrights, you have *BSD and Linux, not UNIX. When that better OS comes along, the good parts will find their way into Linux and into *BSD.
    From the introduction of FreeBSD. "For copyright reasons, FreeBSD may not be called UNIX. You be the judge of how much difference this makes."
    Linux *has* to insist that Linux is not UNIX.
    GNU, GNU's Not Unix. Same thing.
    Linux *is* UNIX. You just can't call it UNIX(tm).

    >The world is advancing at an alarming rate,
    especially in the computer industry.
    Right. It's called Windows(tm). It is alarming. ;-)
  • And if he didn't, he should have.

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