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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."
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!!!
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?
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.
Maybe for its 30th birthday present, someone could buy Unix some vowels.
"And lastly, where is it going?"
Where would you like to go today?
KFG
The obvious answer is Multics. Unix was a pun on Multics since it was originally a single-user OS in its earliest days. The original authors needed something less ambitious that could fit into the small computer they had to play with. Although the scale of unix systems eventually greatly exceeded any known Multics system, there is still some inherent architectural "heft" in Multics that Unix never had (never needed?). It's almost pure theology now, but you did ask. More info at Multicians.org I believe.
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
graphviz
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
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.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.