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UNIX Advertising From Way-back-when
Doug Muth writes: "I found this advertisement
over on Dennis Ritchie's Web site. It's an advertisement for a UNIX system back from 1981 when VAX-11 and PDP-11 systems were still being used. I wonder if Ritchie ever thought UNIX would get this popular?"
5 to 40 terminals. More than 2000 systems in use outside the Bell System (as it was back then). More than 100 user utilities (Emacs probably has lisp versions of more than that now).
Oh, and PWB "allows up to 48 programmers to simultaneously create and maintain software for many computer applications." Think about that next time you do an anonCVS update of your favorite program!
Here's another bit of UNIX history from Ritchie's site: a brief history of the UNIX pipe.
Finding God in a Dog
This sounds like a job for Microsoft Windows NT! After all, it did say it supports up to 200 users... Now if you can only forget about the "without costly hardware part," I think Microsoft could use this as a new ad campaign.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
I'm assuming Dennis Ritchie had originally considered his operating system as just a powerful, utilitarian, data-processing operating system. He probably never imagined so many geeks would take a liking to his creation. He also probably hated using its esoteric interface in the beginning, but had grown more accustomed to it as opposed to the rest of the operating systems which he used before the implementation of his own OS.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Do those bozos really think that this makes anybody want their product? Anybody except a certain... ah, leave that for the trollers.
in only a half hour. How's that for a Unix advertisment?
Anyway my point is that a mini like a PDP11 that could support 30 timeshared users for tens of thousands of $$ WAS a big deal.
The computer research division is home to such UNIX "rock stars" such as Ritchie, Thompson, Kernhigan.
The sheer amount of talent and respect generated by Bell Labs is staggering.
Now, all you punks have gone and 'slashdotted' thier web server! I hope you're happy, you... you bastards!
Are you describing old Unix or Windows 2000? :-)
Specs:" My PDP-11/20 was, like many machines, sold to me via the University of Wisconsin surplus program. This particular machine happened to be originally located in the Electrical Engineering Department real-time control lab that was sponsered by Professor Richard Marleau. Inside the panel, just above the CPU, is an RC11 disk drive. The RC11 is a 65K word (128 K byte) fixed head disk drive. After all these years (the system was first purchased around 1970) it still works!"
Also this PDP-11/45 sports such wonderfull specs as:"The PDP-11/45 is of approximately the same vintage as the PDP-11/20, but is a much more sophisticated machine. For one thing, it was a micro-coded CPU. It had robust memory management, not seen in microcomputers from Intel until the 80386. It could also support two separate buses: one primarily intended for memory, and the second generally used for peripherals. This is not unlike today's "local bus" PC's. I cut my teeth on Unix on a PDP-11/45 system at the University of Wisconsin in 1976 along with my friends Paul and Hannes (among others)."
This PDP-11/05 graphics system. " The GT40 was a graphic system, often used as a graphic terminal for DEC's PDP-10 and PDP-20 mainframe systems. The CPU was a PDP-11/05, but used the green color scheme of DEC's graphic systems rather than the magenta color scheme normally found on PDP-11's. The GT-40's main claim to fame is probably the famous Lunar Lander game, written by Jack Burness, as a consultant to Digital at the time."
___
As soon as slashdot posts a story, the site usually goes down, or least get's slow, and does not answer requests.
It seems to me that their is enough bandwith among some slashdot users to setup a kind of automatic temporary web mirror system.
The mirrorer's machine would one a small script that would listen for requests from slashdot and then would scrape the info from the other site. This could all happen before the story was even posted.
Of course if the site was running asp, cf, php, pearl, java servlets, or some other language generating the pages it would be harder. But chances are those kinds of sites would have the bandwith needed, or closer to then some of the random static html pages we see here from time to time.
addict (-dkt) v. tr. addicted, addicting, addicts. 1.To devote or give (oneself) habitually o
And what a solution! Post links to the Unix Haters Handbook, rant and rave about how you hate it's archaism, even equate every Unix supporter to someone who will slam you without reason.
Well, thanks to you're wonderful and informative post that informed me of my options and alternatives to *nix derivatives, I've decided you do indeed deserve to be branded. Microserf I won't say, strange you would assume so. But like I said, you named so many alternative ways to think about OS'es in general that I am forever in your debt.
Now, seriously now, your post has about as much base as the average '[insert name here] sucks!' post. Try this on for size:
Unfortunately, the average MacWorld reader is so infatuated with their MacOS 9 plaything that they won't stop to consider the horrible horrible flaws that plague the entire MacOS family. Even more sadly, he will steadfastly hold close to his belief that anyone who doesn't like MacOS must be an evil Microserf, and in doing so will pass on the opportunity to learn that there are things better then the Beast from Apple.
Replace the term MacOS recursively with Windows. Or DOS. Or OS/2. Or anything. Next time, be constructive. At least the link you provided was a decent look at languages.
The following is my stance on this issue: If Unix is indeed the wrong way to do things, it's a wonder it's survived for so many years and is now coming back not only in the free OS'es but in Apple's new commercial offering for the home user. Unix itself may not be what's so wonderful, but the fact that there is a platform with standards behind it (POSIX) that allows programmers to write once and port many ways may be what's so wonderful.
In '81 I was spending the summer sitting in a windowless lab hacking in Ratfor (a preprocessor that added C like control flow structures to Fortran IV) on a PDP-11 for controlling experiments and analyzing data; a lot of which involved writing routines to rescue data for ham handed graduate students who kept putting the damned RK05 disk packs in crooked. Didn't have a Unix account, but I did screw around on Multics for fun. A few years later I got to work on Unix System III, which was nice and clean, but god it needed a symbolic debugger (adb only gave hex addresses).
Gosh, remember what it was like to get up and go out for a sub and sit on a park bench while your computer compiled linked a program that was altogether maybe a couple of K lines long? One misplaced semicolon could cost you hours. The first time I saw a compile run that did more than a couple of lines per second I was in awe.
Remember when Usenet primarily ran over UUCP on 1200 baud modems?
Remember when you could swagger into a job interview with absolutely no credentials and only a tiny bit of tenuously related experience and have them eating out the palm of your hand? I guess some things don't change that much.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Some brave soul is mirroring the image.
http://reltheon.yi.org/~rgomes/unixad.htm
I think the cartoon aim's to be kind of New Yorker-ish. Something the bosses of yesteryear would associate with class and sophistication.
In other words, they're trying to associate themselves with James Thurber's wit without bothering to produce any new wit of their own.
It seem incomprehensible because nobody would try to sell something by making associating it with a "classy" magazine now. In twenty years, the current dot-com ads which try to borrow some of the hip by adopting a post modernist GenX look without the incisive irony will look equally pathetic, I assure you.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
even equate every Unix supporter to someone who will slam you without reason.
No, I equated the average Unix supporter to someone who will slam me without reason. I have found this to be the case, in general.
Unfortunately, the average MacWorld reader is so infatuated with their MacOS 9 plaything that they won't stop to consider the horrible horrible flaws that plague the entire MacOS family. Even more sadly, he will steadfastly hold close to his belief that anyone who doesn't like MacOS must be an evil Microserf, and in doing so will pass on the opportunity to learn that there are things better then the Beast from Apple.
That's actually a very good look at the average Mac user. (And I'm using a Mac myself right now.)
Next time, be constructive. At least the link you provided was a decent look at languages.
Actually, the entire tunes.org site makes for excellent reading, and you can drop by at OPN #tunes anytime for a rational discussion on why Unix sucks. (The site linked to by the OP also has a lot of text which you might consider constructive.)
If Unix is indeed the wrong way to do things, it's a wonder it's survived for so many years and is now coming back not only in the free OS'es but in Apple's new commercial offering for the home user.
Why? It's Gresham's Law, as it's always been: good software drives out the bad. (Not that, say, Windows or Mac OS are any better than Unix, no... but there have been many other OSs which, despite being technically superior to Unix offerings, were deprecated for other reasons. This process was very similar to what's happening nowadays to the corporate environment, with Micro$oft's relentless push towards WinNT.)
Unix itself may not be what's so wonderful, but the fact that there is a platform with standards behind it (POSIX) that allows programmers to write once and port many ways may be what's so wonderful.
I have two things to say about that: (1) There have been standards before POSIX. (2) POSIX imposes the Unix worldview upon the programmer, and therefore constrains and hinders the system engineer's freedom to make something better out of the OS. Otherwise, no objections.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
cm.bell-labs.com is running Plan9
Then again, if anybody's going to know how to play tricks with identifying a Unix system by its TCP stack, I'm guessing it's dmr... :-]
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
If you worked in computers back then, you'd realize this was a fairly impressive number. It meant as maybe 50,000 people or more had accounts on Unix machines. And in '81 terms 50K users was a huge number.
81 was really was a cusp. The exponential growth of computer technology had been going on for some time, but in absolute terms it hadn't amounted to much outside of large research labs and corporate data centers. The first Intel processor capable of handling a decent OS was four years away; the 68K was available then, but I don't know if the PMMU had shipped yet; the first 68K based Unix boxes I remember were circa 1983. We had ten programmers working on that box, which was in processing terms about the same speed and memory as a palm pilot.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I wonder if they would send out some literature?
Ideology is for ideots.
God yes! It was just like playing the piano.
And I miss the blinking lights.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yeah, my favorite right now (and you don't even have to be at -1!) is OOG. If not for the content, then for watching the moderators fall over themselves trying to moderate the posts one way or the other.
--GnrcMan--
You've missed the point. Gresham's law is a conclusion based on an analysis of market reactions to software. It does not mean that there can be no good software; it means that, for several reasons of many different kinds, products which are technically inferior generally tend to gain marketshare while their superior competitors languish. WinNT is a prime example of Gresham's Law at work.
That does not mean trying to write good software is pointless; I personally am still a believer in the Right Thing (as opposed to New Jersey's "Worse is Better" philosophy). After all, Gresham's Law is more like Murphy's Law than like, say, the Laws of Thermodynamics. I.e., you get to bend them from time to time, if you try really hard.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
dude, you have no sense of humor (and neither does that kaufmann guy). you might want to actually look at the damn link before spouting off. BTW, the UNIX haters handbook was written by people who contributed significantly to UNIX itself..heres a clue - dennis ritchie contributed to the book as did programmers who worked on the solaris NeWs system, NeXT and others. and moderators - that applies to you too. man...i dont believe i got moderated down for posting a link to the handbook.
I guess that makes me the geek's geek.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This reminds me of the old days back when Usenet used to run mainly over UUCP links. We used to have a UUCP connection up five or six hours every night. Boy, did that give you an incentive to jump on off-topic threads. Of, course you had plenty of time because it gave you something to do when you were waiting for your programs to compile, and boy do I mean wait. CC used to compile, what, a hundred lines a code a minute? And don't get me started on the ld. Cripes, when the linker started I'd get up and go for a run around the lake (I was fine strapping, young lad in those days, always full of energy for a run, a all night coding session, or a good flame war; it's too bad my complexion was so bad and I spent all my time coding and reading science fiction).
Anyhow, the accountants were always giving us guff about the long phone calls, but we'd tell them it was the "UUCP" connection and they didn't know what the hell UUCP was so they'd go back to their cubicles and go bother somebody they could understand.
Uh, what were we talking about?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If the site isn't especially new, it may already be mirrored at Google.
Will I retire or break 10K?
dude, you have no sense of humor (and neither does that kaufmann guy).
;)
Sure I do. I just happen to think that Unix does, in fact, suck - and I did so long before I found the Handbook. I've spoken to at least one of the authors in length, and he also thinks that Unix sucks. So, it seems to be a consensus... after all, why do you think Ritchie and the gang have left Unix for Plan 9?
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Well, now code compiles and links like lightning. You have no excuse.
Boy does it ever, but I still have an excuse. I have to program for NT, and I write flames on my Linux box while I'm waiting for NT to reboot.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
>But POSIX isn't an operating system, it's a standard.
True.. Unix systems are free to ignore posix.
This isn't without problems and most feel the advanages of a standard are far greater than the disadvantages...
Boy, miss the point yet again, will you?!?
>If you bother to take a look at systems such as Oberon or Squeak, you'll find that they're both very feature-full and completely unrestrictive
If you can change EVERYTHING then I know ONE feature you'll NEVER have....
Consistency.. with out this writing code is a nightmare...
This is why Posix was created in the first place..
That's a logical fallacy if I ever saw one. Customisation and flexibility do not necessarily imply lack of consistency. Any programmer can write code for Squeak and be assured that it'll run flawlessly on any Squeak system - yes, even if the user of said system has decided to completely change his environment. This works thanks to clever use of metaobjects. Remember, just because Unix does it the brain-damaged way doesn't mean there's no other way to do it.
"3,000 people cann't be wrong" of course they can...
However normally a larg body of people comming up with the same answer are at least close to the truth.
That's an absurd statement. It's only even marginally true when the truth happens to somehow match the mixture of common-sense and popularly diffused ideology that the populace tends to believe at any given time. Even within the IT field, which is supposed to be made up of smart(er) people, at any given time the general consensus about just about anything is just plain wrong.
There are many ways to make a larg body not think for themselfs...
I don't believe any of them apply to this situation
Oh, please. The modern IT field is a fucking paradigm of social dynamics gone bad. You've got your clueless masses, your bunch of evil conspiracies, your even larger bunch of not-particularly-evil but still self-interested parties; you've got your ruthless manipulation of the general opinion throughout whatever means necessary, your "keep 'em in the dark" philosophy, your FUD wars... et cetera et al, ad infinitum. Considering this, you mean to tell me that you really expect that the widespread adoption of Unix in this midst is any more driven by reason and straight-headed economics than the widespread adoption of Microsoft software? Bah.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I just don't see your point of trying to abash us Unix fans because it isn't theoretically perfect. We are not impressed nor are we suddenly ashamed and enlightened.
:)
You're not supposed to be - it's just meant to get people off their high horses. "Unix sucks" is first and foremost a direct reaction to "Unix rules". There are just so many people who believe with all their heart that Unix is the Second friggin' Coming that I just can't help but play devil's advocate; indeed, for some people, Unix (or whatever) may suck the least, but there's a huge leap between that and the "non-Unixers are lusers" feeling.
So, in conclusion... Unix sucks!!!!
P.S.: I fail to understand how you can be an Unix fan. Please clarify.
P.P.S.: Tunes is more than a lot of hot air. The thing is, it's a hugely ambitious project, not to mention very vague. However, even as we speak, there's a lot of effort being put into Slate, a proposed high-level language to be used to bootstrap Tunes. (Well, two people working in their spare time doesn't really qualify as "a lot of effort", but they're two very good computer scientists - Brian Rice and Lee Salzman -, and it's better than nothing, eh?)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Of course, even 20 timeshared users for tens of thousands of $$ would be a big deal when the mainframes STARTED at $1M.... and actually I think USL paid around $250K for their Vax 780, complete with two of the big 500Mb drives. That was more storage space than their $6M mainframe had at the time!
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
are these the only good reasons to use C?
No, these are the only good reasons for the Tunes project to adopt C/C++.
if C/C++ are that bad, why didn't everyone switch to lisp or something else?
"If COBOL is that bad, why didn't everyone switch to Ada or something else?"
"If WinNT is that bad, why didn't everyone switch to Linux or something else?"
Et cetera et al. Ad populum - as I was explaining to Felinoid, the general consensus is wrong very often. People are using C/C++ for a variety of reasons - very few of which really represent valid technical points, IMAO.
the people at tunes.org are trying to invent a language for use with their OS. Is this a very smart idea? why would anyone want to include some sort of lisp interpreter inside the OS?
You've missed the point of Tunes. It intends to go even beyond - to break the barriers between system and application, environment and program, programmer and user, OS and language. It intends to build a foundation so that your system can be anything you want it to be, so that you have full computing freedom. In short, we want to integrate our language and our OS, and be able to change them both at will, from within themselves. If you read further into the Tunes pages, you'll find a lot more information explaining why this is actually a Good Thing.
isn't it a bit weird to invent a language to suit your OS?
I don't know... the Bell Labs gang seem very fond of it... case in point: Unix and C, Inferno and Limbo... et cetera.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I think the no maintenance or tech support is because the Bell System had signed a consent decree with the Justice Department that prohibited their entry into the computer and software business. This restriction was removed when the Bell System was broken up.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The Motorola 68000 was similar to the PDP-11 in its addressing modes and memory model, but it had that funky divide between data registers and address registers. For example, to do an indexed read off a pointer to an array, you'd load the pointer into an address register (like A1), then you'd load the offset into a data register (like D1), then
move (A1)[D1],D0
(the above is not the 68000 assembler's format, BTW, it's been too long :=-( ).
Anyhow, even with that address/data register split, it was still head and shoulders above the (blech) 8086. But the one I really wanted to get my hands on was the ?NCR?AMD??? 32032, there was a big write-up in Byte Magazine on the chipset and it made me slobber (even if I can't remember who made the stupid chip!). Had a MMU that implemented true paged virtual memory, had a symmetric instruction set that greatly resembled a VAX, etc... this was right after Motorola introduced the 68000, which had no MMU and thus really wasn't well suited for Unix. Unfortunately, the maker of the chip never managed to ship them in volume or with adequate performance. Kind of the same story as with Zilog and the Z8000, making microprocessors back then was a lot of hand-drawing masks and stuff, and many of the old-line companies just couldn't scale their design process to the "new" 16-bit microprocessors. Probably the only reason Motorola managed the 68000 was because they gave up and microcoded most of the instructions, and even then, the 68000 was late to market and thus missed the IBM design win (because IBM needed something available right then and there, and the 8088 was "good enough"). I still think we would be better off if Motorola had beat Intel to market... even the Pentium III and Xeon suffers from a serious lack of available processor registers (makes GCC's optimizer make aweful noises and die messily from time to time -- ask the kernel guys about all the work-arounds they've had to do when the optimizer craps on their code). One thing you could not accuse the 68000 of was a shortage of registers (it had 16 -- 8 address and 8 data, though 2 of the address registers were reserved for stack and program counter, and 1 of the address registers was usually used as an offset to the current stack frame).
_E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
What I miss are all those neat PDP-11 addressing modes. I used to love writing assembler in MACRO-11.
At my workplace, we excessed our PDP-11/23 running V7 UNIX last year. It had 256KW of RAM and a 40MB 8" Winchester disk. It was so old that it didn't have vi or csh, just ed and sh. Networking was limited to UUCP over a 1200 bps modem.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Just kidding, Rob, Hemos, etc...
Free music from Jack Merlot.
You know, this thing deserves to be saved.
But since it's offtopic everywhere, I'm not sure how to do it.
Instead of moderating it up, I'm going to say, "Nice job" and lose my ability to moderate it at all. Only makes sense.
D
----
Plan 9 strikes me as "more Unix then Unix". Everything is a file. Everything. No more ioctl, or fcntl, just have a few extra "control devices". (I know, you put the smiley there, but I had to respond....)
My big problem with the Unix Haters Handbook, is not that they hate Unix. I rather hate parts of it too. It's just that the whole seems to be better then all the other stuff that is out there, at least that I can get!
My beef with it, is that while it did discribe Unixs failings (and sometimes things I didn't think of as failings) at great length, it seldom described a system that did it better. It did for error messages (I think it liked the VMS error system), and it did for a hand full of other things, but for less then half.
To me that just makes it a bitch session. Which is fine if that's what you want. I would rather have something point me at a "right way", something for Unix to grow, or at least something to pine for that can't be retrofitted. I woulnd't buy a book telling me my car sucked because it only has a 190HP engine. I might buy one if it told me how other componies managed a 240HP engine in the same space. At least if I were mechanically inclined ;-)
(and yes, I have the tunes project page up in another window, that looks more intresting then the UHB)