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The History of UNIX
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.
"Unix may suck, but Miguel swallows." - Anonymous
(snicker..heheeee)
http://www.research.att.com/~north/graphviz/exampl es/directed/unix.html
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.
my blog: good times, man, good times
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".
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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 from the multicians.org site.
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. 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."
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
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
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
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?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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!
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
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.
1000 SlashDot sigs
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
Regards, your friendly neighbourhood cranq
Seastead this.
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)
Got Rhinos?
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?
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I thought the history channel was going to do something like this, but it turns out that it was "The History of Eunuchs."
Pax Digitalia
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.
"Like another legendary creature whose name also ends in 'x,'"
What "creature could they mean"?
The Lorax? The Sphynx?
[Connection closed by foreign host]
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 ? (The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System)
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.
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.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
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.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
If your main means of locomotion is "stumbling", you won't get far in this world... CL-HTTP is just one HTTP server in Lisp. And finding that took all of 30 seconds in Google.
Are you adequate?
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?
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.
-- Dave
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
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.
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().
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!
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....
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
There are some very interesting insights into his work on Unix & C.
Specifically:
The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System
and
The Development of the C Language
If you're reading these slashdot articles you should be reading these papers instead!!
Also check out "The Unix System" by S.R.Bourne.
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?
Are you adequate?
...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...
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.
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 :-)
Sailing over the event horizon
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.
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
http://www.uwsg.iu.ed u/usail/external/recommended/unixhx.html
http://www.hsrl.rutgers.edu/ug/uni x_history.html
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