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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."
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.