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Visual Map of Unix history
psychosis writes "A friend pointed me towards this site that has a really interesting diagram of the History of Unix. It shows where all the development splits occured, recombined, and dissolved into the ether. The diagram is available in several different formats (html, pdf, and PS), so all can enjoy!"
Unix the royal OS.
Cut my first OS-lovin' teeth on a Magnum pizzabox running MIPS Unix - man, those were glorious days. I'll never forget the smell of those Magnum pizzaboxes when we first unpacked 'em, set 'em up on a desk and plugged in a terminal ... what was it, 50 MIPS (software-MIPS/spec, not MIPS/cpu) or so?
Back in those days, my 25mhz 386 was pretty dope, so having a Magnum pizzabox was delicious. I wasn't really a big fan of DOS (but *was* a big fan of DesqView running multiple DOS shells), so to have cranked up MIPS Unix and be given a Magnum box for my porting effort, that was a sweet, sweet day.
Man, that's some serious nostalgia right there. Wonder if I can get a Magnum cheap somewhere these days, to go alongside my aging Indy collection...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Shouldn't the VIsual map mean that you can navigate it as text with the VIsual editor? What's this graphical stuff doing in a Unix page.
Heresy! Burn them all! Force them to use Windows!
On a more serious note, I *am* strongly skeptical about the credibility of a site that links to a Rhonda Hauben article.
hawk
Actually, these days it runs on Intel CPUs. Although they continue to maintain the m88k version, they haven't sold any 88k based machines for many years now. It's actually one of my favourite Unices. It sucked quite badly in early versions, but later ones are much better. Interestingly, it's the only Unix version I know of (other than Linux) that doesn't originate from "real" Unix. The kernel was rewritten from scratch to conform with the specs. It contains none of the original Unix code. The userland was all licensed from SVR4, though.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
There are some good links to the original classic code, such as the first C compiler by Dennis Ritchie. Now all I need is the old vi editor code by Bill Joy and I'll be set!
:)
I'd give my left mouse button for a genuine compiled binary by Mr. Joy himself...
Perhaps you were mistaken and it doesn't contain any Mach code.
You misspelled "ROMP". :-) The RT PC used the IBM-developed ROMP; see The IBM RT Information page, and pages linked to it, such as the IBM RT system hardware FAQ, which says:
Dave Cutler, as per this earlier posting of mine.
And the evidence to support this belief is? (The fact that Cutler was one of the people working on that project - I seem to remember hearing that "Prism" was the name of the RISC architecture they were doing; I don't know whether the OS they were doing had the same name - doesn't ipso facto mean that the next OS he did included any code from that project. Ideas, maybe, but not necessarily code.)
No, the BeOS kernel is not UNIXy at all. If you read the FAQ at be.com (if it's still there--I haven't checked in a long time) they say something like the following: Although we admire some aspects of UNIX, we feel that an altogether new built-from-the-ground-up approach is necessary. To this end the BeOS kernel draws the best from other operating systems and incorporates completely new approaches to problems where necessary.
Well, it could be because Darwin draws on the FreeBSD community for some of the tools. We've actually had a smallish discussion about this on the GNUstep discussion list, and the project leader for Darwin said that the decision to use BSD tools rather than GNU tools was related to the requirements of the GPL.
I think it's mostly because Microsoft has enough money to pay professional type houses to produce top of the line typefaces. I mean, old Billy boy spared no expense when it came to getting good fonts. But that kinda describes the whole Microsoft process doesn't it?
Windows CE (WinCE) is actually a fork from NT, not from Windows '9x. It's portable, pure 32-bit, and Unicode-only (no ASCII), all of which definitely do NOT apply to '9x/ME.
I think the creator of the chart is well aware of what a "Unix system" really means. Most of the world accepts "Linux" to mean "complete systems using the Linux kernel", in the right context. This is no exception.
Under your proposed definition, the chart is still wrong, as the dates given on the chart are not dates for releases of "complete systems using the Linux kernel". And surely you know that there are a number of contributors to the complete system that uses the Linux kernel that do object to use of the term "Linux" to describe the whole system, even if you think (as I do) that some like RMS carry it too far.
There is no mention of Linus anywhere on the web page.
Well, duh. There is more to a picture than the characters and lines on the page, there is also what is implied to an intelligent reader. Putting an event on the diagram marks it as significant; leaving an event off the diagram marks it as insignificant. The release dates of the various Linux kernels can be obtained from many sources; it would be nice to tell the story of the Linux distributions, as it is woefully under-publicized.
It's debatable what makes Linux Unix-like - certainly the kernel API was designed from the start to be Unix-like, and there are Unix-like tools from BSD and the X project in particular, so it's far from accurate to say that the GNU tools are what makes it Unix-like.
:) It's clear that GNU has contributed massively to the typical Linux distro, I just wish they would not try to take *all* the credit...
I expect this will start another GNU/Linux flamefest
I noticed that virtually none of the Digital UNIXes are on there. There's Digital Unix, the outgrowth of OSF, but nothing about Ultrix (unless I missed it). Hardly a fringe variant, Ultrix got as high as 4.0 and was on Vaxen, workstations, RISC workstations, all sorts of stuff. Being as how this is the UNIX I learned on, I'm kinda miffed to see it missing. :-(
It's also interesting to note that, as recently as a few years ago, DEC was still using their standard character generator for their PCI-based Alpha machines -- now that's what a UNIX console is supposed to look like!
-- Offtopic --
The quote at the bottom, as I read this:
Reminds me of the time in school when I found a phone number that was one digit off from mine, but not currently in service. I recorded the intercept message, put it as my outgoing message, and added "but that's not my number, and I'm not here anyway." Best message I ever did, but really pissed off all my friends and family... :-)
I think they missed AIX/370 --> AIX/ESA. This was an extremely botched IBM port of AIX to the IBM 370 series mainframe processors. We tried it, but it made our mainframe run about as fast as a PC.
This was around 1994. I don't know what it was derived from, but it was an extensive rewrite, and deserves its own breakout in the chart.
I notice that you have Win 3.1 as the direct ancestor of Win95, with DOS influencing.
Shouldn't it be the other way around, given that the first version of Win95 was really just DOS with some 32 bit code, and a GUI totally unlike Win 3.1?
At least it should be equal contrib...
I think it would be interesting if the thickness of each line represented the number of copies in use. This way you see which ones are really the "trunks" (like BSD and AT&T) and which are the twigs.
bp
Well, it is not entirely correct. In fact, IRIX 6.3 was a fork that worked only on the 02. IRIX 6.4 was for the release of Origin 2000. IRIX 6.5 was the first all platform release since 6.2 and 6.2 was the first all platform release since 5.3.
So IRIX did "evolve". Just on different platforms. And Linux is better tracked due to the open development method.
If you look at the IRIX that was developed for the last two years for SN1 (O3000), it was done almost
completely separate from mainstream IRIX 6.5 devolopment and then pulled back in (in an incredibly painstaking manner) to the mainstream 6.5 release for 6.5.9. You just don't know this happened because it was all inside of SGI.
The point of the picture is to show inheritance and it portrays Linux as being a standalone branch with no connection to what went before.
Er, no. The diagram shows code forks. By and large, Linux systems incorporate little to no code from other Unix systems, largely because of the licensing issues. Perhaps there should be a dashed line from some of the BSDs, since there is some BSD code floating around in your average Linux distro, but by and large, Linux (for the obtuse: in this context, Linux == Linux kernel, GNU tools, some BSD tools, XFree, Perl, Python, KDE, etc., etc.) stands alone. Indeed, the line from Minix to Linux is incorrect.
The kernel is just a tiny part of the OS...
And, once again, I state: Most of the world accepts "Linux" to mean "complete systems using the Linux kernel". This diagram is no exception.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I saw one of these systems many years ago. It had an 8086 with custom MMU hardware. It ran Xenix.
I expected to see UNICOS in there somewhere, which is UNIX for the Cray.
And I always wondered about those Unices that the Emacs and trn installers ask about... Venix, Eunice, etc.
Also, isnt EROS a Unixish OS?
--
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
The great grandaddy was totally left out. I thought all variations of *Unix* stemmed from the reasearch of Multics.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Speaking of odd Unix-ish operating systems, anybody remember OS-9 (not to be confused with Plan 9 or OS/2)? I didn't see it on the chart, but it may not have been Unixish enough to get on. It was originally developed on the 6809, a 8 bit microprocessor, and eventually ported to 68000. It was able to address something like a meg of RAM and I believe on the 68K it had virtual memory.
The company I worked for back in '84 had one shipped to us for a month or so along with a pair of comically inept technicians in the hope we'd consider a port of our Unix software to it.
It didn't seem so bad for a computer with limited resources; certainly it was miles ahead of the very early versions of DOS that were kicking around then. On the other hand, we had a sweet little 68K based Unix System III box from Plexus, that proved you could put a real operating system on a microcomputer.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'd like to see a similar map for programming languages, although the few I saw back in school were pretty lacking, and some were big jumps.
At least with Unix, it's easier to trace.
Ever think that some day all the geneology map will be put together officially (by the government of course so that they could mess with your 'past', and prove Jefferson never committed adultery...) but a 3-d real time traversing of the world's geneology....
Rader
Also, CP/M is not mentioned at all, which DOS was originally based on (named QDOS, not written by Microsoft, created according to the specs of a CP/M manual.)
And verily did the hackers become confused, for their servants now spoke dialects, numerous beyond counting, and what was said to one might not be understood by another, or might be misunderstood;
And the hackers cried out for relief, saying "Let there be but one and only one operating system on every machine, that our lives may be easy and carefree!"
And Eris Discordia heard their cries. And she did grin most wickedly. And she did whisper into the ear of Sir William of Gates, that he should steal the face of the golden Apples, and place it upon the body of the Devil's Operating System;
And thus was THE ABOMINATION, W*ND*WS, brought forth upon the earth.
And there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth amoung the hackers, who now realized that diversity, and even a certain amount of disorder, is healthy. And they fought mightily against the abomination.
And Eris relented on the poor suckers, and allowed there to be GNU, and Linux, and the brethern BSD, and Darwin, and all manner of software which each might change to his or her own liking, in a manner most eristic. Or not. And it was good.
Fnord.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Yes, among other things BeOS isn't multiuser. It has a POSIX layer, but then so does NT... NeXTStep/OpenStep/Mac OS X Server/Darwin/Mac OS X really are full BSD systems on top of Mach.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
- It interesting to see how Linux progresses as compared to, say, Irix. Linux progresses, and each branch (from kernel 2.0 to 2.1) is the "new" Linux, with the old branch dying off, while Irix runs in a straight, continuous line.
It'll be interesting to see how they continue - It looks like chunk by chunk Irix will be opensourced, and absorbed into Linux.You have to wonder whether IBM are ultimately planning the same fate for AIX.
Oh, but he's missing kernel 2.4.
cheers,
G
Did IRIX really start as a fresh implementation as the chart describes? I thought it was based off the BSD releases, based on early data sheets I have on IRIX 3.x...
--LP
I'm another developer on comp-hist, and we've begun to integrate this tree and a few others. If you've got interesting info, please drop us a line!
Actually A/UX was never Mach based - it came from another whole family tree that's missing from the chart - 'UniPlus' which was an early System 3/5/5r2/5r3 variant with BSD networking and utilities on top - A/UX came from the system 5r2 branch.
UniSoft did over 100 ports of UniPlus to mostly 68k based platforms in the early to mid 80s.
When I first tried MS DOS 1.25 (1.24?), I was fiddling around with both it and Digital Research's CPM86. The only reason DOS got the nod was that the computer I bought had Perfect software bundled with it; Perfect Calc...Writer...and some other 'Perfect' programs. They weren't bad at the time, back in 1982.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Ah, I forgot about that one. I attempted to create a Zork-style game with it without docs, knowledge of arrays, or examples. Really fun to do. I think I spent more time on my Zork-like game then Zork itself!
Unfortunately, because I didn't know what I was doing, when I added rooms the program grew exponentially.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
but Steve Jobs picture and not Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman?
:)
Read all the way to the bottom.
"You may be wondering "Why does Steve Jobs appear in this unix history?". Simply because he has made the best unix computer ever : a NeXTcube powered with NeXTSTEP operating system."
Which seems reasonable, other than his odd misspelling of "G4 Cube powered with OS X operating system."
OS/2 tails off at 1.1, when most of the GUI work that influenced Windows was done afterwards.
.NET into your TV sets...
On top of that you have Microsoft's participation in the pre-divorce OS/2 2.0 project, and the direct connection between the "MS OS/2 3.0" project and Windows NT.
Another major problem is that WinCE is not a variant of Windows 9x, but instead is based on an embedded version of NT. I suspect MS will resync CE and NT around about Whistler so that they can build
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
y'know, showing the evolutionary forms of Geeks. Primordial forms with slide rules and pocket protectors, later forms with their ponytails and nez pierce glasses. never mind the migration patterns of the tribes
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
well, QDOS was written from scratch, though a goal was to mimic CP/M. DOS 2 added significant Unix functionality so Unix would have to be mentioned also. CP/M was modelled after the DEC OSes like RSX-11 and RT-11: anybody remember PIP? :)
BTW, I thought of more of the DOS lineage that should have been included: Phar Lap DOS extenders, QEMM and 386Max... was TopView in there?
There should also be a parallel line with it graphing the amount of sweat on Uncle Bill's forehead.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
How about a map tracing the derivations of internet file sharing software and the resulting lawsuits?
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Visual map of Windows History
--
Am I the only one that thought about the southern joke "...his family tree doesn't fork"?
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
The thing that makes Linux Unix-like (libc, shell tools, etcetera) is the GNU System, which was started in 1983, but doesn't appear anywhere in the chart.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
What about Coherent, a V7 clone for 8086/80286 from Mark Williams Corp. and QNX?
I'm a bit suprised that these two are missing, but XINU has made it onto the chart, even though it doesn't show any actual inheritance from any unix strain (and rightly so: XINU's only relationship to unix, aside from the name, was entirely spiritual).
The picture is beautiful, but it repeats a common error.
... and replacing them with a diagram showing the early SLS, LGX, and Slackware releases ...
I think the creator of the chart is well aware of what a "Unix system" really means. Most of the world accepts "Linux" to mean "complete systems using the Linux kernel", in the right context. This is no exception.
Drawing the picture this way gives too much credit to Linus Torvalds...
There is no mention of Linus anywhere on the chart or the web page. Furthermore, the diagram itself is not, as near as I can tell, about giving credit for anything. It merely tracks code forks.
The folks who gave you the hundred-odd programs required by Posix plus all the development tools, mainly the FSF and its army of volunteers and the folks at Cygnus...
Your average Linux distro includes a number of utilities from the BSDs, as well. (Indeed, pretty much any Unix these days encorporates ideas, if not code, from BSD.)
Even more important, the folks like Peter McDonald, Adam Richter, and Patrick Volkering...
Indeed. I wonder if we should include people like ESR and companies like Red Hat, who have been largely responsible for bringing Free Software onto the corporate map?
The picture can be fixed by removing the Linux kernels
That would not "fix" anything, only expand it. The "Linux" branch includes all of those implictly.
I do think a diagram of the history of the Linux distros, in the same spirit as this one, is a cool idea, though.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Oddly... BASIC is not mentioned anythere there. Basic has evolved quite a bit from what it used to be..
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
Not only is there a Unix History tree, a friend of mine and I have been putting together a whole computer history tree. Check it out at comp-hist.sourceforge.net.
Fascinating map, I could spend hours just researching from it to find out what the actual relationships are (i.e. what portions of OS A were integrated into OS B)...
One thing: IRIX is shown beginning around 1986 right out of the blue. According to SGI.com's section on IRIX, it was incepted in '82. I'm curious which it is, and whether it was derived or really conjured up from scratch.
The only others that appear out of thin air (other than UNICS) are Minix, Xinu, and Mach (A/UX briefly so before getting BSDed). Does anyone know if IRIX, like these, was an original design? It's certainly unique in its own right.
Also, did I miss UNICOS in there? As I understand it, it is a UNIX (looks like a duck, quacks like a duck) derived from SysV with some BSDisms thrown in... showed up in '85, I reckon.
... and especially, it doesn't show all the rebooting :)
What !?!?! No 2.4.0-test7/pre7???
Those bastards!
"Your pen is bugged..." "How do you know? " "This is an action thriller"
...where Unix stopped being an OS.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
The picture is beautiful, but it repeats a common error. Every Unix or Unix-like distribution listed in the picture consists not only of a kernel, but of hundreds of utilities (all the little programs that you can count on having in your /bin and /usr/bin directories).
Drawing the picture this way gives too much
credit to Linus Torvalds and too little to two
other groups of heros:
The picture can be fixed by removing the Linux kernels (or at least putting in large asterisks making sure that these are kernels only) and replacing them with a diagram showing the early SLS, LGX, and Slackware releases, with the branching relationships showing how the later distributions depend on the earlier ones.
The authors leave out the hordes of lesser known Unicies. I'm sure the graph would be completely unreadable if any of these were included.
Does anyone remember MIPS Unix? I'm not sure of it's origins, but I think MIPS made it before SGI bought them outright (although I think it was still maintained despite the fact SGI had their own version of Unix, IRIX).
Or what about Amiga UNIX (Aka AMIX)? From what I remember, this was a straight port of V.5.
And of course, there was Data General's DG/UX for the Motorola 88K series of RISC processors. And even Dell had their own Unix for a while. And this isn't counting all the versions of companies that went under, and all the tweaked versions used in academia...
fork(), anyone?
...especially the part where Minix is just coasting along, and then... "Look! that little line poking out. Whazzit say? Linux 0.0.1?"
Kinda makes you proud.
It interesting to see how Linux progresses as compared to, say, Irix. Linux progresses, and each branch (from kernel 2.0 to 2.1) is the "new" Linux, with the old branch dying off, while Irix runs in a straight, continuous line.
Looks kinda Darwinian, in fact. If I may make a poor analogy, it's like the difference between balancing a pole on it's end, and balancing a tripod.
I'm still scared of the person that took the time to put that together, though...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
here is the source for the first linux kernels:
linux0.1
Name: Linux 0.1
Date: 1991-09-17
Reference: http://www.memalpha.cx/Linux/Kernel/Master.html
Influenced by minix1.5.10
linux0.2
Name: Linux 0.3
Date: 1991-10-05
Reference: a printed calendar
Successor to linux0.1
greetings, eMBee.
--
Gnu is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX
Also very interesting, chart of the history of computer languages:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/lang/
And not as complicated, history of DOS and Windows:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/windows/