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UNIX hits the Big Three-Oh

Posted by chrisd on from the happy-birthday-there-big-fella dept.

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."

6 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oh Me Oh My by uchian · · Score: 2, Informative

    Go back a directory and you can get the timeline in PDF, PS, and EPS format - the postscript file is ~130K in size.

  2. Re:Happy Birthday! by Lance+Fuckhoff · · Score: 2, Informative
    (how do you script a mouse movement?)

    "set the position of the mouse to (0, 30)"

    Assuming you've got the appropriate AppleScript extension, of course. Mac OS X is cool.

  3. How to draw timelines and other graphs by GGardner · · Score: 4, Informative
    This groovy timeline was probably drawn with the graphviz package, which is probably the coolest download you've never heard of:

    graphviz

  4. Re:wow older than I am by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Unix was designed as a cutting edge system for very very fast supercomputers.

    Not that I don't like Unix, but I have to burst your bubble. Unix was written to run on an old PDP-8 so Ken could play a game. He took some ideas from Multics, some original ideas (Everything is a file and pipes) and built it into Unix. Then to justify the expense to AT&T, he turned Unix into a timesharing system and called it a text-processing OS.

    So no, it wasn't designed for "very fast supercomputers", and nor was it really percieved at the time to be "cutting edge".

  5. That's not Unix specific by Nailer · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Unix Programming Manuel by Jama · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can find those manpages here:

    Unix Programmer's Manual November 3, 1971.