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

well, how about that

[Raleel]

I turned 30 today as well...and I'm a unix admin...go figure

more than half the life of commercial computing

[Mendax Veritas]

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.

Happy Birthday!

[Saint Aardvark]

I work on the helpdesk of a mid-sized ISP, and we use FreeBSD for just about everything. 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 (Hi Mary!). Suddenly it struck me just how powerful this all was: one (relatively) small tool piped into another, using simple plain ol' text.

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.

Pish-posh... operating system whippersnapper

[Colin Bayer]

Back in my day, we didn't even have fork(). We only had spoon().

forking

[Kiro]

fork ()

GCC error: The Oracle says, there is no fork

.

Re:The earliest UNIX systems is circa 1969-70

[bihoy]

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.

Re:Unix Programming Manuel

[Waffle Iron]

famous ones like boot, chmod, mv, cp, and ls

Maybe for its 30th birthday present, someone could buy Unix some vowels.

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!