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."
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
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.
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.
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!
Here are the first few paragraphs from The Bell System Technical Journal article entitled "The UNIX Time-sharing System", by D.M. Ritchie and K. Thompson (manuscript received April 3, 1978)
UNIX has certainly come a long way from these meager beginings.
UNIX is a general-purpose, multi-user, interactive operating system for the larger Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 and the Interdata 8/32 computers, including
(i) A heirarchical file system incorporating demountable volumes,
(ii) Compatible file, device, and inter-process I/O,
(iii) The ability to initiate asynchronous processes,
(iv) System command language selectable on a per-user basis,
(v) Over 100 subsystems including a dozen languages,
(vi) High degree of portability.
This paper discusses the nature and implication of the file system and of the user command interface.
I. Introduction
There have been four versions of the UNIX time-sharing system. The earliset (circa 1969-70) ran on the Digital Corporation PDP-7 and -9 computers. The second version ran on the unprotected PDP-11/20 computer. The third incoporated mutliprogramming and ran on the PDP-11/34, /40, /45, /60, and /70 computers; it is the one described in the previously published version of this paper, and is also the most widely used today. This paper describes only the fourth, current system that runs on the PDP-11/70 and the Interdata 8/32 computers. In fact, the differences among the various systems is rather small; most of the revisions made to the originally published version of this paper, aside from those concerned with style, had to do with details of the implementation of the file system.
Since PDP-11 UNIX became operational in February, 1971, over 600 installations have been put into service. Most of them are engaged in applications such as computers scince education, the preperation and formatting of documents and other textual material, the collection and processing of trouble data from various switching machines within the Bell System, and recording and checking telephone service orders. our own installation is used mainly for other topics in computer science, and also for documentation perparation.
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
But that other OS would... 'forget' patents at random. Hmm... perhaps instead instead of patents expiring after 20 years, they should expire by act of lottery?
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
happy birthday unix! coincedentally, nov.3 == 365 days uptime for my unix machine!!
the odometer lives!
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