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."
Need I say more?
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Everyone of us hates patents, yet loves a system that was born out of the needs of processing patent applications.
Unix is obviously evil.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
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... used... for processing patents?!? No! That can't be! Patents are evil! Unix is good! Unix can't be evil! ...Can it?
/* ....
I have to hurry...
rm -rf
OK I'm saved now...
But what OS should I use now? MacOS X is Unix... BeOS is kind of Unix... What else's left? Windows XP... No, it can't be... There has to be something else... Oh God, don't do this to me!!!
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
And lastly, where is it going?
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.
I turned 30 today as well...and I'm a unix admin...go figure
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
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!
Back in my day, we didn't even have fork(). We only had spoon().
Want Linux games? HERE.
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?
fork ()
GCC error: The Oracle says, there is no fork
.
and Windows 1.0 was released in 1985
Yes, and according to your link, "Microsoft Windows was announced November, 1983" but wasn't actually released until November 1985.
TWO YEARS of amazing Microsoft VaporWare(tm), and the marketing machine still rolls on, flattening all in its path. It's the one thing that UNIX has never figured out how to do... even in thirty years...
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
Go back a directory and you can get the timeline in PDF, PS, and EPS format - the postscript file is ~130K in size.
I think you are confuseing "getting it right" with "fitting the lowest common denominator" Just because McDonalds sold the most hamburgers does not by any stretch of the imagination make them the best restraunt.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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!
I love that UNIX timeline, I probably visit that page once a month. I did, however, notice that unlike most other unices on the page, the Cray UNICOS OS entry hasn't been updated to reflect recent versions. Cray has always been conservative with their numbering scheme, often heavily padding the numbers with zeros (current release of UNICOS is 10.0.1.0 with 11.0 coming soon). Would be nice to see minor updates such as with UNICOS releases reflected on the timeline as well. (UNICOS updates are no more frequent than linux kernel updates and are generally just as significant).
Actually, most home users hear "emacs" and ask "Is that some new apple internet thing?"
You can't do that with in WIMP environments, God bless 'em (how do you script a mouse movement?)
The mouse has pretty good functinoality. For everything else, there's Perl.
UNIX must be next. Slashdot said so.
Unless Slashdot's dying too. Then I may have to leave the basement. And that would suck.
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!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Just voted on /. poll, Halloween is my birthday. Im 3 days older than unix. Now I feel REALLY old.
-
The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a little. - Joe Martin, Porterfield
graphviz
The real question then might be: Who fell asleep and let Bill take over the world?
A lot of people and companies did, but the main one would have to be IBM. Their attempt to stuff the genie back in the bottle by taking a 90 degree turn with OS/2 and the PS/2 MicroChannel line was the fumble that let MicroSquish inherit the mediocrity franchise lock, stock, and Barrel.
There were a bunch others, of course: Lotus, Apple, WordPerfect, WordStar, and even Digital Research all participated in dropping the ball, and let's not forget all the windoze lusers in the world who still think that "auto-save" is a feature, rather than a symptom of a critically broken underlying operating system.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yeah, but then you'll be asked to document it - with the COBOL program... it's already documented. Heh.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
This is great news! In just a few more years, UNIX will be old enough to be elected president!
If I say it's safe to surf this beach, Captain, it's safe to surf this beach.
Apocalypse Now, right? Recently saw it... wierd, wierd, disturbed movie. Really awesome characters/actors though, and Colonel Kilgore ranks at the top.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
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.
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
If OS/2 was really dying, I am pretty sure IBM would have opensourced it as a final fsck-you to Microsoft. My guess is that they know it still rocks, and are just waiting for Microsoft to lose their strangehold on the commercial intel-based desktop os market. OS/2 could still become the comeback kid.
If I have understood things correctly, OS/2 was what OSX tries to be - an efficent and userfriendly operating system with a solid text-based washboard underbelly. BeOS too, for that matter.
Stop the brainwash
I'm running Cygwin. It actually tells me when it kills the thing, and is silent on failure. *shrug* Doesn't make sense to me either.
Aw main()!
any comments about me being old, and I'll tell you to fork(roff).
You know you've been doing this too long when your manager says "to keep him in the loop" and you ask "for or do while?".
(sigh)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
OK. I meant that the flow of informaition is more complex coming from the computer with a WIMP but less complex going to the computer. You have just described my exact point.
OK. Now you have complex network tasks to do which have millions of variations. Is the WIMP still superior? I don't think so.
I think that when VCI (Voice Command Interface) becomes perfected and widespread, it will give the best of both worlds.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"Computer, recursively delete everything starting with a dot."
Possible interpretations:
I wonder if people are confusing Pascal's ":=" with "!=". That would explain a lot of the troll moderators...