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."

Comments

Actually, no.

[kfg]

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

Re:Actually, no.

[Paul Komarek]

As a mathematician and computer scientist (interdisciplinary doctoral program), I would prefer that mathematical algorithms were *not* patentable. As a rule, mathematicians seem to feel that they are *discovering* truth, not *creating* something (besides publications ;-). The algorithms, which are simply the answers to certain questions, already exist; we're just trying to *find* them.

-Paul Komarek

How far have we come

[sketerpot]

It's been 30 years. How far has UNIX (or some workalike) come since then? I know we have the internet as a common thing, and UN*X has been moved to a side of the computer market by Windows, even with shockingly crazy technology (they still use drive letters!), but a lot of smart people have made cool things for UN*X.

And lastly, where is it going?

Re:what HAVE we done?

[reynaert]

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. I don't really know. Are we restricting ourselves by staying with antiquated concepts? or are we creating something great with a proven system.

Re:wow older than I am

[dragons_flight]

Well MS-Dos 1.0 was created in 1981, and Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, so I'd say UNIX hasn't come as far or as fast as it could have.

The real question then might be: Who fell asleep and let Bill take over the world?

Re:wow older than I am

[tealover]

And as for UNIX not going far enough, have you used Mac OS X? This is UNIX on crack, smack and PCP. It is the best version of Unix on the market today with respect for your average computer user. It's far more user friendly than Linux and more advanced than Windows. Other versions of Unix offer anything OS X is missing.

Hahahahahahahaaha! So this is what Unix now has to offer? A system built on the principles of open standards now works best on a propietary computer that costs double what a comparable Intel sytem costs?

Hahahahahahha! That's some endorsement!

Good point.

[einhverfr]

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!

Re:One way was easier....

[scrytch]

Are there any examples of (possibly failed) systems that are more powerful than UNIX?

Well the obvious question to your question is "for what?". Mainframes have been doing something like vmware for ages, had hugely advanced (and yes, crufty) networking protocols, record-oriented files, and I/O so well tuned it would make a strong webmaster cry. About the same time Unix was announced to the world, another OS built on capabilities security came out, but languished. VMS is built around async I/O from the ground up. NT inherits that I/O from VMS, and just about every kernel object can be inspected and given ACL's.

Mainframes also had a huge cost and came with the IBM monkey on your back, VMS only ran on DEC boxen, NT got features slapped on it that degraded its stability, and Unix was nearly free to start (AT&T was under a consent decree and basically couldn't be in the software business), completely free soon after, and portable to the campus toaster ovens. Unix had an evolutionary advantage similar to the ones humans enjoy: it could live anywhere.