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."
graphviz
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.