Slashdot Mirror
UNIX hits the Big Three-Oh
sparcv9 writes: "If you scope the timeline over at Éric Lévénez's site, you'll see that today, November 3rd, is the 30th birthday of the UNIX Time-Sharing System V1. The Open Group's UNIX history describes the features of Version 1 as having an "assembler for a PDP-11/20, file system, fork(), roff and ed. It was used for text processing of patent documents." We've come a long way in just three decades."
Need I say more?
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
30 Years and we are finally getting it right. Do you think it was the 30 years of software refineing or just the fact that the hardware has cought up to what we wanted the software to be?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
guuys i found some cool stuff at unix rules
Everyone of us hates patents, yet loves a system that was born out of the needs of processing patent applications.
Unix is obviously evil.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Looking at this really brought back some memories. I remember recieving the first edition of the famed "Unix Programmers Guide" by K. Thompson and D.M. Ritchie. It was released November 3, 1971. The guide included over 60 commands including famous ones like boot, chmod, mv, cp, and ls. If only I still had it today...
Does anybody have the original programming manuel? It is indeed a classic piece of memorabilia to own especially if you're a Unix fan.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Lucky for us it wasn't PDF... ;-)
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
Reading the UNIX family tree was like a walk down memory lane. Some people can hear a song and remember what it was like way back then, when we were young and crazy. I found myself reading the chart, going down the UNIX genealogy, drifting back to the AT&T 3B2 in the basement of Holmes Hall (Michigan State) back in 1986. Or I found myself in an apartment in the summer of 1993, with Linux 0.97pl4 installed on my 386sx. Or I found myself arguing with my boss that this Linux thing would really take off someday. Of course, it did, and my boss was an idiot. (You know who you are!) That was Linux 1.0.
Wow, that was fun.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
At least according the the article I'm looking at in myt hand that was published by D.M Ritchie and K/ Thompson in the Bell Labs Technical Journal, July-August 1978.
Unix... used... for processing patents?!? No! That can't be! Patents are evil! Unix is good! Unix can't be evil! ...Can it?
/* ....
I have to hurry...
rm -rf
OK I'm saved now...
But what OS should I use now? MacOS X is Unix... BeOS is kind of Unix... What else's left? Windows XP... No, it can't be... There has to be something else... Oh God, don't do this to me!!!
Not "everyone of us" hates patents.
I don't. Patents are one of the most useful and benificial tools of the technological age.
I DO dearly hate the missuse and total bastardization of the patent concept that we now see applied, for instance the application of the patent concept to pure IP, like operating systems.
KFG
And lastly, where is it going?
Thát mán hás tóó mány áccént márks ín hís námé.
rm -r /bin/laden
(I know this is a little old, but hell... someone out there hasn't seen it yet).
Thank you for reading One Man's Opinion. No participation necessary. Offer void where deemed by law or PATRIOT Act.
unix hasn't changed significantly over the years in terms of the base concepts behind it. Is this a good thing or a bad thing. I don't really know. Are we restricting ourselves by staying with antiquated concepts? or are we creating something great with a proven system.
Photos.
I turned 30 today as well...and I'm a unix admin...go figure
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Interesting to realize that Unix has been in use for more than half the lifetime of the commercial computer industry. Unix is 30 ("born" 1971); commercial computing goes back only another <=20 years, to the early '50s. This is sort of cool, as it shows how flexible and open-ended the basic Unix concept was, that it has managed to evolve and remain useful all this time.
You can't do that with in WIMP environments, God bless 'em (how do you script a mouse movement?). You can't do that without a lot of people all sharing their work. You can't do that, in other words, without Unix. I was this close to dashing off a fan letter to Thompson and Ritchie before I stopped myself (I'm sure they've heard it before). Yes, I know Unix is a lot more than T&R, but it was either that or spam everyone who'd ever written a utility.
Anyhow...just a note, if they're maybe reading this, to say thanks very much. Like I read somewhere else and promptly ripped off:
Unix soit qui mal y pense.
Carousel is a lie!
Back in my day, we didn't even have fork(). We only had spoon().
Want Linux games? HERE.
fork ()
GCC error: The Oracle says, there is no fork
.
Just think of UNIX as trying to make up for its evil past by hosting such fine patent flaming sites as Slashdot. :-)
Besides, everyone already knows which OS is REALLY the evil one.
__
The question is not where do I want to go today, but where have all my credit card numbers, p0rn website passwords, and naked doggie sex pictures gone?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I'm wondering, WIMP stuff has made computers easier to use, but not more powerful. Are there any examples of (possibly failed) systems that are more powerful than UNIX?
(yeah, you could argue about the meaning of 'powerful', but you know what I mean)
Marijn
Everyone has know this for a long time.
A real life BSD zealot.
whoa! how'd you do that?
That that timetime was the work of a script and *not* hand-designed. :)
________________________________________________
suwain_2
TIA
I could have sworn I saw this here (maybe as a sig, dunno).
"At the current rate of development of the windows/dos environment Microsoft will eventually invent unix."
So, what, another 15 more years or so?
Will it be called the GallBatesmer *nix distro?
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
Those patent guys used to use that system?
Bring some of those guys back...people reviewing patents these days need some training!
Sheesh!
In fact UNIX is a pun on MULTICS.
UNIX is much smaller and simpler.
happy birthday unix! coincedentally, nov.3 == 365 days uptime for my unix machine!!
the odometer lives!
Wow, I didn't know they used cheap mexican labour to program software back then...
(No offense to mexicans. If you're offended, you obviously don't get it.)
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I love that UNIX timeline, I probably visit that page once a month. I did, however, notice that unlike most other unices on the page, the Cray UNICOS OS entry hasn't been updated to reflect recent versions. Cray has always been conservative with their numbering scheme, often heavily padding the numbers with zeros (current release of UNICOS is 10.0.1.0 with 11.0 coming soon). Would be nice to see minor updates such as with UNICOS releases reflected on the timeline as well. (UNICOS updates are no more frequent than linux kernel updates and are generally just as significant).
Boy, you look bright now that his post is +5! Now you see why you've always sucked at gaining karma!
Not pipes, but air ducts, among other things. Tape up the joints to make them more or less air tight.
reading all these coments just makes me feel old.I used Unix on a PDP11 back in the early eighties when I was a fresh young development engineer. God ! I hated it. VMS was a lot more complete..... but UNix is still going.
ROCK ON!!!
And UNICOS/mk is up to 2.0.5.55
Backups are for wimps. Real men post their data in comments and have slashdot mirror it
You can't do that with in WIMP environments, God bless 'em (how do you script a mouse movement?)
The mouse has pretty good functinoality. For everything else, there's Perl.
UNIX must be next. Slashdot said so.
Unless Slashdot's dying too. Then I may have to leave the basement. And that would suck.
too bad linux fucking sucks!
TOP TEN SIGNS YOUR NETWORK APPLIANCE IS BASED ON LINUX
10) Console sometimes says "Filesystems have gone too long without fsck".
9) Randomly connects to slashdot and posts insipid comments under
anonymous-coward@yourdomain.com.
8) Supposed to be a web cache, but somehow turned into warez cache.
7) Whitepaper is 10,000 pages long, 1 page of info and 9,999 pages of
source code.
6) Manual only comes in two languages, Finnish and elisp.
5) Case made out of space age synthetic alloy of duct tape and dental
floss.
4) Not really sure what it does, but weenie administrator said purchasing
it would be good for "the community".
3) You get a mail from some dork named CmdrTaco wanting you to do an
interview about it.
2) You attach a line printer and it starts alternating between printing
banners of "FREE KEVIN" and something called DeCSS.
1) All your other network appliances complain about it getting drunk
and blasting the free software song at 3am.
actually, i think it's a testimony to the inflexibility of humans wrt technology adoption ... like dvorak vs qwerty.
think of the richer security or filesystem models that we could have if we weren't chained to a 30 year old OS. or the greater modularity, stability and distributed contributableness of a microkernel. etc.
let's not be so overjoyed that we still live in the 70s.
it's interesting to note that email predates unix, celebrating its 30th birthday earlier this year.
Arguing with people using other operating systems, or explaining people what Unix is, I always told them of something beginning in the early 70s or late 60s, and never realized that this idea is even older than me, now being 0x1f...!
Wow!
twq
You have hit on something important, I think. WIMPS are great and very powerful (compare Mozilla to Lynx for a moment before you become hostilt to the WIMP). This is particularly useful when the human is receiving the majority of the information and the commands given to the system are simple (go here, select that, and so on). The information density is great for the human but lacking for the computer.
However, CLI's are the best way to hand complex instructions to a computer. The information density is great for the computer (you can send a lot of information to the computer very concisely) but not so great for the human. So if I want to view a simple report of activity in my log files, WIMPs are wonderful, but if I want to do more complex data-mining, I will have to add some command line functionality (a CLI of sorts...).
Horses for courses. And Happy BDay UNIX!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It's funny that you say that because Linux isn't UNIX. It wasn't, and never will be. Some think it is just because it has a single hierarcal filesystem, but they are on crack.
Don't worry... GNU's Not Unix!
Just voted on /. poll, Halloween is my birthday. Im 3 days older than unix. Now I feel REALLY old.
-
The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a little. - Joe Martin, Porterfield
graphviz
Unix really isn't out of date.
:P
It's still *current* technology. It's still in use, it still does what it does damned well.
The same can't be said for many other things. Well, maybe something like Cobol, but that doesn't do what it does very well.. Give me a thousand line Cobol program, I'll give you the same thing in a tenth of the code in another language.
I thought the first *real* program on Unix was a game!
It's the pipes I tell ya!!!!!
Actually I think where we currently are is pathetic. Picture video games and movie special effects 30 years ago compared to the ones today. UNIX ain't changed much.
Unix is great and all but I want to know its fault, and at the tender age of thiry some must be showing.
I have trying to get a comprehensive list of what *IS* wrong with Unix. The sort of faults I am looking for are the things like root is god, files can have only one owner at a time etc... Does anyone know of such a list.
Way more powerful, a vastly better development platform, etc., etc., etc. Squashed by "Worse is better."
Peace,
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I'm sorry, but how can you claim we live in the 70's? Does the broad family of UNIX-like operating systems still has to offer nothing but ed and roff?
Seriously, just because something is that old, doesn't mean it's 'not good anymore, and we shall move onto better things'. Damnit, a wheel is pretty darn old, yet the basic concept still exists. The surface look and feel of a wheel has changed, we added things like bearings, tires, and more. Yet, it remains basically the same principle, and works in a similar way. Same thing with UNIX family.
--- d'oh
applause
The real question then might be: Who fell asleep and let Bill take over the world?
A lot of people and companies did, but the main one would have to be IBM. Their attempt to stuff the genie back in the bottle by taking a 90 degree turn with OS/2 and the PS/2 MicroChannel line was the fumble that let MicroSquish inherit the mediocrity franchise lock, stock, and Barrel.
There were a bunch others, of course: Lotus, Apple, WordPerfect, WordStar, and even Digital Research all participated in dropping the ball, and let's not forget all the windoze lusers in the world who still think that "auto-save" is a feature, rather than a symptom of a critically broken underlying operating system.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Thats very cool... That means that Unix is almost 2x as old as I am! :) This brings me to a question however... Were the majority of telephone systems still run by human operators as late as the late 60's to early 70's when computerized systems running Unix began to become more prevalent? What was there before, if anything, and how did it fare in comparison to the the automatic switching performed by the 'nix mainframes?
Finally, I'm no cracker, but how (even today) do the computer switching systems on phone/cell networks stay so protocol-transparent? Why is it that "phreaks", etc. rarly, except maybe on some outlandishly massive scale involve messing w/ the unix machines which run these networks?
-----------------------------------------
Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
...originally used for processing patents?
Wow. Maybe we'll find that NT was originally used for printing standards.
proof of Osama's guilt..
This is great news! In just a few more years, UNIX will be old enough to be elected president!
30 years, either time to bow out gracefully or time to do a Logan's Run and go for it!
:)
I loved that show
plan9 is your progeny and I thank you for that.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If I say it's safe to surf this beach, Captain, it's safe to surf this beach.
Apocalypse Now, right? Recently saw it... wierd, wierd, disturbed movie. Really awesome characters/actors though, and Colonel Kilgore ranks at the top.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Let's say you maintain this lexicon and related sematic network. You are responsible for ensuring that the network remains relatively balanced with respect to your users' input. Your lexicon is about 3 millions phrases. Now how do view correlation and the sizes of groups of similar questions more efficiently without a pretty colored graph drawing it on the screen for you. How to efficiently present this information to the operator (even a very skilled operator)?
It seems more intuitivc that data with a huge number of points would be too much for a human, but a computer would thrive on it. Human can do the easy, small sets usually just by looking at the plots.
We've come a long way in just three decades.
Nope. Dont think so. Actually, I think Unix people should be pretty embarassed about quite a few things, considered it's been around since stone age. Windows started 20 years after Unix and look where it is now. Anyone remember the AT&T Unix PC ?
A while back I was going through three-year-old modem logs looking for records of someone dialing in (billing dispute): grep for the UID, piped to awk to add up the time online, convert it to hours and print it out, piped to sendmail to mail it to the billing dept...
You can't do that with in WIMP environments, God bless 'em
Why not? Most GUI environments have had scripting capabilities to do this for a while, Windows has been able to do this task for around for years, and I'm sure Apple scripting language (not sure of its name - Applescript sounds obvious) can do it too.
What's Unix specific about it? Scripting rocks, but its hardly unique.
The wheel hasn't changed significantly over the years in terms of the base concepts behind it. Is this a good thing or a bad thing.
.A GNOME app under KDE still feels like...a GNOME app under KDE. Red Carpet is a brilliant ap but it acts differently from all the other KDE apps on my desktop. That really sucks. Standardization will hurt lots. The LSB settled on the RPM packaging system, told distros not to put things in /opt, and said init scripts must live in /etc/init.d. Some distros who had minor things to change have modified the way they are, but expect screaming when someone dare suggests the non-RPM distros convert.
Its postive:
* Unix is easily the most reliable popular desktop, or server Operating System. Uptimes can and have been measured in years
* Modern Unix (of which Linux is the standard, but keep that low for now) is open, uses documented APIs, and provides users with great choice and flexibility as to how their machines work
* I've got high standard, and the ability to reconfigure a machine for say to day maintenace tasks without rebooting is in my opinion a standard part of any real server OS.
* Despite what most Slashdotters think, a modern Unix machine is capable of being used and administered entirely through its GUI or via the scripting-happy command line.
* Root sucks or rather, relying on one particular account to be the sole administrator sucks, and this si what most Unixes do. That stems from another problem
* RWX permissions suck. There's good replacements that work well and are just as easy to administer, but Linux, most BSDs, and many proprietary Unixes still use dodgy permissions which weren't desgned for security. Not being able to have any kind of fine grained control over who has access to a file sucks.
* lack of standardization hurts the platform. GNOME versus KDE hurts by dividing effort more than it helps by providing competition
If OS/2 was really dying, I am pretty sure IBM would have opensourced it as a final fsck-you to Microsoft. My guess is that they know it still rocks, and are just waiting for Microsoft to lose their strangehold on the commercial intel-based desktop os market. OS/2 could still become the comeback kid.
If I have understood things correctly, OS/2 was what OSX tries to be - an efficent and userfriendly operating system with a solid text-based washboard underbelly. BeOS too, for that matter.
Stop the brainwash
but i am 19 days older :P
Unix is good, but LINUX is a cheap and crappy version. GET A PROPER UNIX NERDS!
The Unanonymous Coward
Reading some more about Unix, on another Open Group page I found:
What about Windows® NT?
Microsoft® Windows NT was developed as a completely new, state of the art, 32 bit operating system. As such, it has no connection with the UNIX system source code. However, market demand for POSIX.1 , POSIX.2 has led to developments by several companies of add-ons that provide partial functionality. Should the functionality meet the requirements of the UNIX brand then indeed it could become a registered UNIX system.
UNIX XP: would you like that?
Unix is a scoprio? cool :) then all unix sysadmin should be getting laid fairly often.
Classic lines, thanks for the memories.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Aw main()!
any comments about me being old, and I'll tell you to fork(roff).
You know you've been doing this too long when your manager says "to keep him in the loop" and you ask "for or do while?".
(sigh)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
OK. I meant that the flow of informaition is more complex coming from the computer with a WIMP but less complex going to the computer. You have just described my exact point.
OK. Now you have complex network tasks to do which have millions of variations. Is the WIMP still superior? I don't think so.
I think that when VCI (Voice Command Interface) becomes perfected and widespread, it will give the best of both worlds.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
fucking dork. Lighten up!
The fisrt really usable version of Windows was about version 3.1. Version 1 and 2 were crippled by the whole "paned windows" model. You really needed Windows 3.1 or Windows for Workgroups to get a version that was actually useful. That was around 1990.
Prior to that Windows was mainly a way to forestall sales of Desqview and equivalent.
They patented the fact that in order to create child processes you have to fork() first? wasnt that patented by Nature way before 30 yrs ago?
[alk]
Rumor has it that making a silk purse from a sow's ear is possible, if the sow's ear was originally made from a silk purse, but that doesn't make it a piece of cake. Your vary may mileage.
Then, why is the 'epoch' taken to be January 1, 1969? This puzzled me more than anything when I read the headline to this story that November 3, 2001 was the 30th b-day of unix. I'll leave the math as an exercise to the reader, but I came up with November 3, 1971 as this birthdate, which does not line up with 1969 at all.
What gives?
---
slashdot: A failed experiment.
"Computer, recursively delete everything starting with a dot."
Possible interpretations:
I wonder if people are confusing Pascal's ":=" with "!=". That would explain a lot of the troll moderators...
He does have a valid point, but the transition is harder.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.