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Unix's Founding Fathers

Posted by michael on from the uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow dept.

Dave B writes "There's a nice article on Economist.com about Dennis Ritchie, the genesis of Unix, and the C programming language."

308 comments

  1. Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    it doesn't ask what would have happened had it all been patented, back in the day. Nice bit of history, but it was a remarkably different way of operating back then.

    1. Re:Stangely by ultrabot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      it doesn't ask what would have happened had it all been patented, back in the day.

      Simple - it would be dead. Just like the WWW if it were patented. Or Linux (well, not patented but placed under proprietary license).

      --
      Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
    2. Re:Stangely by black+mariah · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not a damn thing would have been different. It wasn't Free Software, ever. It was all duly licensed and inspected and all that good crap. It was proprietary software, patents wouldn't have done a thing to it.

      --
      'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
    3. Re:Stangely by ModernGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If it would have been patented, there would be no linux, no open standards, all would be closed, compaq's would run compaq os, ibm's would run OS/2, dell would run DellOS. Noone could make software in one language and have it interoperate between operating systems like we seemlessly do today thanks to C. We would have to pay money to develop software, we would spend more time worrying about liscensing then actually programming. Computing would not be what it is today. Thank god they did not patent any of it.

      --
      Sig: I stole this sig.
    4. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Patents are not the same as copyright. With copyright, you only have to avoid using the same code (iow copying). With patents you have to avoid using any of the patented concepts. In some cases this means having to use a vastly inferior algorithm, even if you came up with the better one yourself and would have written your own code. If Hoare had patented Quicksort, people would have had to use Bubblesort for decades or pay licensing fees, which is impossible for Open Source projects.

    5. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Any posts with references to 1984 will be ignored.

      We call this ignorance.
    6. Re:Stangely by Silver+Sloth · · Score: 1

      My father went to work for Ma Bell back in 1959. On day one he was handed a dollar bill to cover the patent (I think - I was six at the time) on any work he did there> I see no reason why this would have changed in the sixties

      --
      init 11 - for when you need that edge.
    7. Re:Stangely by alangmead · · Score: 3, Informative

      But it was, to the limit of patentability that was available at the time. This was before Diamond v. Diehrand the US patent office deemed software as "pure mathamatics" and unpatentable. The patent that was developed from Unix, the setuid patent was written in terms of the gates in memory that got flipped and read to check access control.

      If Bell Labs hadn't assigned the patent to the public domain (supposedly over the cost of collecting license fees) Then development on Unix clones would have started much later.

    8. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      But do you really think that algorithmes and "concepts" should be patentable? Where do you draw the line? At what point does a "new" technology become a barrier to devellopment then? I think that the current state of thinking (in the US mostly) about software and logic patents is absolutely ludicrous. I mean the basic innovation in Unix is to keep the kernel small and efficient. Is that patentable? What about the tools approach? Is that patentable? Ludicrous as patenting the concept of a street or sidewalk. Or 2+2 for that matter. The fact that Ritchie's work at the Labs was property of his employer had only as an effect that other instances of the system where stimulated to review the programs and make rewrites for their implementation, as such we have a better software now than then. This is done through collaboration and competition all rolled into one. Nothing a patent could make better here.

    9. Re:Stangely by spektr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It was proprietary software, patents wouldn't have done a thing to it.

      There's a difference between proprietary software and patented software. BSD could easily reimplement all proprietary parts of UNIX and won the lawsuit that followed. But if these parts had been patented ("e.g. a method to write an OS using a programming language"), that wouldn't be possible. I think you're either uninformed or trolling, or both.

      There was an implementation of UNIX and it was proprietary. But there were other implementations of UNIX that were free. What matters isn't some implementation, but ideas. And the idea of UNIX hasn't been developed only by AT&T, but also by the UNIX community - in a open way, since the beginning. Patent that and UNIX is dead.

    10. Re:Stangely by Sique · · Score: 5, Informative

      It was stated in the article that between 1958 and 1984 AT&T had to license all its non-telephonic stuff to whoever asked at fairly reasonable conditions. While it was not true free software, many companies and universities at the time were able to get hold of the license, the documentation and the source code and started to modify it and develop their own versions.

      University of California in Berkeley contributed many tools to UNIX and even started to recode UNIX from scratch, following the original UNIX just within the specification limits in 1977, but based everything on its own code.

      When in 1984 AT&T was freed from the anti trust provisions given in 1958, AT&T tried to get the control back over UNIX, which lead to the founding of the GNU organisation and to a legal battle with UCB. The legal battle finally ended with a draw, so the BSD line of UNIX was cleared from copyright infringment accusions, and the BSD tools are still with the AT&T-based UNIX versions.

      So UNIX was in the beginning something quite indifferent between proprietary and free software, basicly a proprietary system which was handled like a free and open source one. This was the fallacy of the system: After 12 years of free work on UNIX suddenly AT&T changed the licensing and the way the licenses were enforced. The GNU Project tied to make sure that no one contributing to GNU could pull an AT&T again by requiring all code contributed to GNU should be licensed via GPL.

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
    11. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      setuid has a patent . Assigned to public domain I believe.

    12. Re:Stangely by gl4ss · · Score: 2, Interesting

      well, copyrights are meant to keep people from using a copy of your work without your permission.

      patents are meant to keep other people from writing the same thing..

      so.. if the command line for example was patented..

      .

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    13. Re:Stangely by black+mariah · · Score: 1
      so.. if the command line for example was patented..
      Then you'd have to come up with something different.
      --
      'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
    14. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ATTENTION black mariah (654971) The above post contains a reference to 1984, please DO NOT READ IT.

    15. Re:Stangely by black+mariah · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm neither uninformed nor trolling. When I'm trolling, you'll know it by the fountains of blood and endless trail of dead Slasbots in my wake.

      AT&T was forced to license its software to anyone that wanted it. Patented or not, they had to license it. By the time they were no longer required to license their software, most every patent for the main gist of UNIX would have lapsed.

      --
      'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
    16. Re:Stangely by black+mariah · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      My sig applies only to the book, not the year.

      --
      'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
    17. Re:Stangely by black+mariah · · Score: 0, Troll

      This explains why the GPL is the way it is better than any of the smelly hippie propaganda the FSF has ever spewed out of its noisehole. "AT&T pissed us off, so here's a nice middle finger in their general direction."

      --
      'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
    18. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      BSD didn't "win" the lawsuit. The University of California signed a license with the Unix Masters which grants them the right to re-implement it. This could be seen as Charity as much as a legal victory.

    19. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uh well yeah, that's exactly what its all about. Even RMS will tell you that himself. Did you think the reason RMS started GNU was a cloak and dagger type secret or something?

    20. Re:Stangely by spektr · · Score: 1

      AT&T was forced to license its software to anyone that wanted it. Patented or not, they had to license it.

      If that was your point you should have said it more clearly. A patent that is licenced to everyone for free is as good as no patent.

      But I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the situation. AT&T wasn't allowed to make money with computer software, but I don't think that means that they had to free every patent they couldn't sell. They could have patented it and simply refuse to license it to anyone ("we're not allowed to sell this at this point of time, please wait 10 years.").

    21. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Heheh... indeed - you'd think he'd ignore posts with gratuitous references to George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four, but no. The year 1984 it is...

    22. Re:Stangely by zoeblade · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Computing would not be what it is today. Thank god they did not patent any of it.

      I like to think that the GNU project (and FreeDOS for that matter) would still have found a way to make free operating systems, even if they had to not base them at all whatsoever on any existing ones.

    23. Re:Stangely by miu · · Score: 1
      Then you'd have to come up with something different.

      Some old SF novel had a quote that applies to this: "When it is railroading time you build railroads". The 70's were the time of the command line - computing power would not allow any other sort of ui.

      So no, they wouldn't have come up with something different.

      --

      [Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
    24. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Personally, I sometimes wish that it had been strictly enforced. Then no-one would use godforsaken freakin' suid stuff...

    25. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      I call this strength.

    26. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Patented or not isn't the real issue. Compare it to the next thing that came along (MS Windows) if you want to see how popular a proprietary system can be... The real issue was, like so many other things, simply the price. When AT&T finally was able to sell the OS without restrictions from their monoply status, they didn't know how to sell their way out of a paper bag in a competitive market. They priced it at about $1,000 per desktop with the compiler and X as extra-cost add-ons. Not long afterwards, Windows NT was available for around $300. Both were incredibly full of bugs. Microsoft seemed to have some focus on making improvements; AT&T had no direction at all. Which would you buy? If early-90's unix had sold for $100/desktop with everything still bundled we'd have a completely different world today.

    27. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Since your sig references the book, I always ignore all of your posts.

    28. Re:Stangely by pizza_milkshake · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I like to think that the GNU project (and FreeDOS for that matter) would still have found a way to make free operating systems, even if they had to not base them at all whatsoever on any existing ones.

      GNU has one, it's called HURD

    29. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      GNU has one, it's called HURD

      Named for part of the stalk of the cannibas plant, notwithstanding whatever those hippies try to tell you about the meaning of the name.

    30. Re:Stangely by jcenters · · Score: 1

      Well, trolled, where's the fountains of blood and endless trail of dead Slasbots?

      I'm rather disappointed.

      --

      vi ~/.emacs

    31. Re:Stangely by Tony-A · · Score: 1

      This explains why the GPL is the way it is better than any of ...

      What AT&T owned was the name. Modern Unix itself, including AT&T's, is much more the product of various universities, including Berkeley and MIT, than of AT&T. "Unix is a trademark of AT&T" at the bottom of articles and research papers was more taking a gibe at AT&T than honoring AT&T in any way. Gnu's Not Unix is still a taunt.

    32. Re:Stangely by jmac880n · · Score: 1

      It was stated in the article that between 1958 and 1984 AT&T had to license all its non-telephonic stuff to whoever asked at fairly reasonable conditions.

      While educational institutions received reasonable license terms, the same did not hold for commercial entities. They paid through the nose for a source license - and there was a time when that was all you could get.

      The fact that UNIX still flourished, despite the high price and poor support (it was a research product, after all) is a tribute to its intrinsic value.

    33. Re:Stangely by black+mariah · · Score: 1

      In another thread. This one's rather lame. :\

      --
      'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
    34. Re:Stangely by DunbarTheInept · · Score: 1

      HURD has no SOURCE CODE that came from any existing Unix, but that doesn't mean it's not based on earlier unixes, at least in concept. If you are trying to make a system that is built on clones of "more', "grep", "tar" and so on, it's pretty clear that your goal is to make something conceptually based on unix - at least at the user-feel level.

      --

      Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.

    35. Re:Stangely by DunbarTheInept · · Score: 1

      Being required to license software does not imply that you have to license it in a way that teaches people how it works. That AT&T did that (as compared to the way a modern EULA typically works (you are allowed to run this. That's it. No peeking at how it works)) is the big deal here.

      --

      Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.

    36. Re:Stangely by nlindstrom · · Score: 1

      No! You are now guilty of committing a thoughtcrime!

    37. Re:Stangely by Poeir · · Score: 1

      You're thinking of, or the sci-fi book was referring to, Charles Fort, who said, "It steam engines when it's steam engine time."

      --
      Sigs are like bumper stickers.
    38. Re:Stangely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Surely you can't patent an idea that in its implementation is 25 lines long (in C, 5 in Haskell). That's just idiocy.

    39. Re:Stangely by mgcarley · · Score: 1

      Sweeet. I should copywrite the "hello world" scripts in all languages, (and all likenesses thereof) - charging small royalites for each time it was used

      Even like, 5c over say, 1,000,000 users/training institutions et cetera would pay a modest yearly salary...

      --
      Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com) // t: @mgcarley
  2. On the fifth day... by chris_eineke · · Score: 4, Funny

    And God spake: "Let there be hell!" and thus the C programming language was born. ;)

    --
    "All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
    1. Re:On the fifth day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And God spake: "Let there be hell!" and thus the C programming language was born. ;)

      when god programs the second coming, he's gonna leave you out of

      double heaven(believers)

    2. Re:On the fifth day... by Tet · · Score: 2, Funny
      "Let there be hell!" and thus the C programming language was born.

      I think you misspelled "perl" there...

      --
      "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
    3. Re:On the fifth day... by javajawa · · Score: 3, Funny

      I hear some people even prefer csh... sadists!

      --

      Meh

    4. Re:On the fifth day... by ultrabot · · Score: 3, Funny

      And God spake: "Let there be hell!" and thus the C programming language was born.

      In fact, if you study the history more carefully, you'll find that God only licensed some thought patterns and algorithms from SCO Group. God still has to abide by the licensing conditions stated therein.

      "In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was copyright (R) of SCO Group"

      --
      Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
    5. Re:On the fifth day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

      I think you mispelled "I'm a retarded perl-hating goth twat"

    6. Re:On the fifth day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I think you misspelled 'mispelled'

    7. Re:On the fifth day... by Tony-A · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "And because Dr Ritchie had been careful to keep the core of C very compact, this [write a compiler] was relatively easy to do."

      Personally I think C is a lousy language, but:
      It is small.
      It is compilable.
      It is useable.

      It is possible to make forward progress with minimal resources.
      Something much better that requires resources you do not have is just pie in the sky.

    8. Re:On the fifth day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think that C sucks big time. C# is a much better language. Of course, Java is a C# rip-off....oh wait...

    9. Re:On the fifth day... by rf0 · · Score: 4, Funny

      You've never programmed in COBOL have you?

      Rus

      --
      Cheap UK and US VPS
    10. Re:On the fifth day... by fuzzix · · Score: 4, Informative
      You've never programmed in COBOL have you?

      I have. It's my job. For those of you who have not encountered COBOL, its reputation is warranted. It is actually designed for clueless suits and it will damage you, both mentally and physically. This is true.

      I do not wear a suit. I am not totally clueless. I am just doing this job to get some cash together to go to university next year.

      The thing is, this place (like most COBOL houses) has a set of standards which may or may not match best practice (when they don't it makes things harder - you may be required to use GO TO!) Any opportunity for hackishness or clever code, small as this opportunity is anyway, is precluded by the necessity to adhere to standards so that the next drone that takes your place will understand your code. No amount of commenting inline on how your nice, elegant piece of code works will sway your manager on this topic. This leads to verbose, inelegant code and an acute difficulty in getting things done in a simple and timely manner.

      This is why I love C, C++, Perl, bash, JavaScript, BASIC, HTML, Brainf*ck - hell, I even prefer VB - anything but fscking COBOL!
    11. Re:On the fifth day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      that's a dumb post. c replaced assembly coding - essentially, it is structured, portable assembly - huge improvement over actual assembly (well, maybe except for 68k).

    12. Re:On the fifth day... by Vitus+Wagner · · Score: 1

      COBOL, its reputation is warranted. It is actually designed for clueless suits and it will damage you, both mentally and physically.

      Cobol fingers? But we are in XXI centure and do not need to type all this clueless staff in - we have text editor or two which do completion for us.

    13. Re:On the fifth day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Say what you will about COBOL, but you have to admit it's verboseness does make it pretty self-documenting. Or maybe that's just the way we were forced to learn it. You could practically read our source code like it was a comment.

    14. Re:On the fifth day... by fuzzix · · Score: 1
      Cobol fingers? But we are in XXI centure and do not need to type all this clueless staff in - we have text editor or two which do completion for us

      A fine point, but I have to write this code on a clucky OS/390 editor. I would use an editor on this Windows host (another bane of my job) but the transfer facilities for transferring files from the host to the mainframe simply do not work.
    15. Re:On the fifth day... by fuzzix · · Score: 1
      Say what you will about COBOL, but you have to admit it's verboseness does make it pretty self-documenting. Or maybe that's just the way we were forced to learn it. You could practically read our source code like it was a comment.

      Forced to learn it... Hmmm... Sums it up, really :)
      Thing is, verbosity does not denote efficiency or ease of use. Yes, it's very easy to read but it's a bloody trial to write and debug.
    16. Re:On the fifth day... by duncanbojangles · · Score: 1

      Dude, you like Brainf**k!? I love Brainf**k!

    17. Re:On the fifth day... by fuzzix · · Score: 1
      Dude, you like Brainf**k!? I love Brainf**k!

      Well, like is a little strong. I certainly prefer it to COBOL :)
    18. Re:On the fifth day... by discord5 · · Score: 1
      I have. It's my job. For those of you who have not encountered COBOL, its reputation is warranted. It is actually designed for clueless suits and it will damage you, both mentally and physically. This is true.

      When I was in school, I was forced to learn this language. COBOL is hell, but as not as much as the people who instructed the classes. Some will go as far as proclaiming you a "heathen" for doing a loop, which is actually something that happened to me once.

      I've once withstood half an hour of conversation (the kind that makes your ears ring), about whether a chunk of code would work or not. Needless to say that the argument "That's not the way you're supposed to do it" was the most convincing argument she had. In the end, it worked, and was more elegant than her solution. I never showed my face in that class again, and on my finals simply used long and boring pieces of code that would take me 3 times as long to type as a loop.

      This is why I love C, C++, Perl, bash, JavaScript, BASIC, HTML, Brainf*ck - hell, I even prefer VB - anything but fscking COBOL!

      From the above languages I'd leave out BASIC, brainf*ck and VB as well. BASIC has scarred me for life, although it was the very first programming language I ever learned. VB is just as evil, only now it's got widgets. And brainf*ck... Despite it's original concept (and the fact that writing a parser is easy), it really is a pain in the buttocks to read code.

    19. Re:On the fifth day... by FlutterVertigo(gmail · · Score: 1

      And the day after that, Microsoft claimed Word, threatened to sue SCO, and SCO looked for other suckers they could go after.


    20. Re:On the fifth day... by FlutterVertigo(gmail · · Score: 1

      COBOL isn't all that tough. It was my fifth language to receive a paycheck in (LISP, FORTRAN, Assembler, BASIC, then COBOL). I made a lot of summer vacation money in COBOL... following behind a consulting firm who judged people by their knowledge of RPG but their COBOL was written using a manure shovel. It was a city of 15k so finding their clientele was pretty easy - particularly the mad ones.

      In terms of the standard application programmer on mainframes today, you can take it, rewrite it and eliminate 50%-75% of it simply because they don't know much about efficiency, just "does it work?"

    21. Re:On the fifth day... by fuzzix · · Score: 1
      COBOL isn't all that tough.

      It isn't tough at all - that may be part of the problem. I am not averse to a challenge now and then :)

      I would like to be able to include methods I have for making an app simpler, but there are some constructs which are just banned (for example, lev 88, EVALUATE) You'll see why below :)

      In terms of the standard application programmer on mainframes today, you can take it, rewrite it and eliminate 50%-75% of it simply because they don't know much about efficiency, just "does it work?"

      I hear that - most of the people here who call themselves programmers are fresh off a 3-week training course. "Does it work?" is the primary consideration. The fact that I have some previous experience is purely coincidental.
    22. Re:On the fifth day... by Curtis+Clifton · · Score: 4, Interesting
      And God spake: "Let there be hell!" and thus the C programming language was born. ;)

      Blasphemy! (Feel free to choose which half of the quote I'm talking about. :-)

      At the time of its creation, C was a real work of brilliance. Without the shoulders of C on which to stand, computing wouldn't be nearly as mature as it is today.

      Kernighan and Ritchie's little white book on C is a masterpiece. All language reference manuals should strive to its level of clear writing and careful presentation. Despite not having coded a line of C in over 10 years, I still keep K&R at arms length. (If nothing else, it's helpful for quickly verifying my spelling of Kernighan when writing Slashdot posts.) It was enjoyable to read a column about the old masters.

      Peace,

      --
      -- Curt
    23. Re:On the fifth day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's called Brainfuck. No need to be PC here.

    24. Re:On the fifth day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Personally I think C is a lousy language, but: It is small. It is compilable. It is useable.

      Personally, while C has its problems, for the time it was a *huge* step forward. It was abstract enough to be considered "high-level", yet at the same time was low-level enough to do a lot of things that prior to that really required assembly language.

    25. Re:On the fifth day... by Shakezoola · · Score: 1

      and he probably doesn't vi either.

    26. Re:On the fifth day... by Tony-A · · Score: 1

      for the time it was a *huge* step forward

      Not exactly.
      The people involved were very aware of the huge steps forward that were being made concurrently. Think of Unix as poor man's Multics. Think of C as poor man's Algol68.
      Rash prediction: Algol68 will reappear in 2068 as a modern language.

    27. Re:On the fifth day... by red+floyd · · Score: 1

      Rash prediction: Algol68 will reappear in 2068 as a modern language.

      But will it have I/O? :-)

      --
      The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
    28. Re:On the fifth day... by FuzzyBad-Mofo · · Score: 1

      Surely he meant to write BASIC instead..

      10 PRINT "HELLO CRUEL WORLD!"
      20 GOTO 10

    29. Re:On the fifth day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What about emacs wrists?

    30. Re:On the fifth day... by weapon · · Score: 0

      I am a BE/BInfTech student (1st Year) and that little white book is on our textbook list as recomended for a first year course

      Weapon

  3. Modules by rf0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nice article and it explains nicely why *NIX is modular in that you can pass output from one command to another via pipes. Quite simply it was just an idea and a dman good one at that.

    R

    --
    Cheap UK and US VPS
    1. Re:Modules by bigberk · · Score: 5, Insightful
      *NIX is modular in that you can pass output from one command to another via pipes
      Definitely, and I think what escapes modern comp sci people is the incredible flexibility of being able to use several simple, distinct programs together to achieve a broader processing goal. Data flow between processes achieves the best separation possible, allows for the ultimate 'compatibility' (inter-process communication) and leaves performance monitoring/control to the OS. In the long term, the UNIX model sounds like a winner to me.
    2. Re:Modules by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > In the long term, the UNIX model sounds like a winner to me

      Then why are most significant UNIX programs not written to the "UNIX Model"? You don't see Oracle or OpenOffice built with pipes.

    3. Re:Modules by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Let's not forget that a toolkit of simple programs is a concept which appeals to programmers, but not necessarily to normal people, much like having a dozen ingredients appeals to cooks more than it does to microwave-wielding urbanists.

    4. Re:Modules by smallguy78 · · Score: 0

      i've never understood how the term *nix evolved. Linix?!! Solarix?!! Ho well

      --
      Nothing costs nothing
    5. Re:Modules by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pipes were a good idea but didn't go far enough. They only provide a wire protocol; a way to get data from one program to another. They would probably have been more useful if they also specified some structure for the data itself, rather than allowing each program to input and output a stream of ASCII text, each with it's own format that you have to munge via. sed/cut/sort/perl/[whatever] before you pipe it into the next program.

    6. Re:Modules by Thunderbear · · Score: 1

      For this to be usable with complex stuff, you need the ability to pipe objects. Textbased stuff does not scale well.

      --

      --
      Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
    7. Re:Modules by master_p · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What the Unix guys did is to invent object orientation before the concept was actually invented. The Unix system *is* object oriented: each program is like an object that implements one interface with two methods: the input and the output. By wiring objects together, all sorts of processing was possible.

      Another innovation was that each program did one thing only, and the wiring between programs was not hardcoded. One could write a million programs, each one doing a different task, but it was the capability of wiring them at will that gave Unix such flexibility.

      The analogous of today would be if we did not program applications, we only programmed classes and then a 3rd party came and wired these classes together. Unfortunately, modern application development has chosen not to follow this way: applications consist of classes that are hardwired into a fixed set that makes change and rapid development difficult.

      Finally, another good property of the Unix way is that there was no datatypes. Everything was text processing. We have come a full circle now that XML dominates the industry...it took us 30 years only to realize that text is the ultimate carrier of information.

    8. Re:Modules by Vitus+Wagner · · Score: 1
      *nix was and still is ONLY true user-friendly system on the marked. It is becouse it doesn't require user to interact with applications. If user don't want to, he can use yes to provide input or grep to minimize amount of output.


      It is a rule completely forgotten in newer OSes -
      If you don't like to read output of this program, let other program do it

    9. Re:Modules by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The analogous of today would be if we did not program applications, we only programmed classes and then a 3rd party came and wired these classes together.
      What about java? There are a lot of classes, that any party can wire together.

    10. Re:Modules by TheLink · · Score: 1

      Well you can do stuff like this with perl, CPAN.

      CPAN is definitely code reuse :).

      --
    11. Re:Modules by Decaff · · Score: 2, Insightful

      it was the capability of wiring them at will that gave Unix such flexibility.

      Not just that - if you connected programs together with pipes they could run as parallel tasks. It was an easy way for even novice users to make full use of powerful machines.

      This is why all users should learn the Unix command line.

    12. Re:Modules by Curtis+Clifton · · Score: 4, Informative
      What the Unix guys did is to invent object orientation before the concept was actually invented.

      Object-oriented programming in Simula predates Unix by nearly a decade.

      --
      -- Curt
    13. Re:Modules by tengwar · · Score: 2, Informative

      Rubbish! Objects contain state (instance variables) and have a set of operations which can be performed on them (methods or member functions). Anything that just takes input and returns output is at best a function.

    14. Re:Modules by Peaker · · Score: 1

      The Unix way of piping utilities is powerful.
      It is great, and at the time perhaps revolutionary.

      But it is not object orientation, by even the most vague definitions.

    15. Re:Modules by ehiris · · Score: 1

      We have come a full circle now that XML dominates the industry

      Oh yeah, SOAP is finally cleaning the confusion and dificulty associated with classes and their inter-dependencies. It's another proof that simple does it. I wish more people would start buying into web services and start publishing WSDLs.
      Is there any open source like UDDI registry available?

    16. Re:Modules by Feztaa · · Score: 1

      It's even worse than that, because the "function" doesn't return any value. Sure, there's output, but the output doesn't "return" to the caller, to goes on to somewhere else.

      Unix pipes are great for stringing commands together, but they're unidirectional, which is a pretty fundamental deficiency. Luckily, other forms of IPC are possible, which fixes the problem.

    17. Re:Modules by master_p · · Score: 1

      Simula (19)67 was the first object-oriented Simula.

      Links:

      http://www.campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipe di a/o/ob/object_oriented_programming_1.html
      http:// www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis4 00/simula/simula.html

    18. Re:Modules by master_p · · Score: 1

      What makes you think a function does not have side effects (i.e. maintain state)? for example a compiler, although it seems to only accept input (source files) and produce output (object files) has variables: the object files it manages. The compiler together with the object file can be thought of as an object.

    19. Re:Modules by LordMyren · · Score: 1

      i'm unaware of any other IPC systems which are inherent to the command line

  4. quick history leason by karmagardless · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Thompson and Ritchie wrote Unix to play a game on. To make it portable they wrote C and a compiler. This was done at Bell Labs on their dime. They let Berkley, and some others, have copies to evaluate and improve, thus causing BSD, and other variants. AT&T allows this and causes the forking of Unix. Then through mirad stupidity and laywer speak we end up with todays chinese fire drill. All because AT&T did not think to guard their original IP by copyrighting it. Then allowed several groups to modify it without central control.

    At least all Linux kernal mods have to be approved by Linus. It's more control than AT&T ever exerted when it mattered.

    1. Re:quick history leason by Lord+Kano · · Score: 1

      At least all Linux kernal mods have to be approved by Linus.

      They only have to be approved by Linus to make it into the "Official" tree. You, I or anyone else could make all of the patches we want and fork the kernel.

      One huge difference between Linux and *NIX is that there is such a fanatical following that if someone does decide to fork the kernel there had better be a damned good reason or else the fork will have no users.

      LK

      --
      "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
    2. Re:quick history leason by yppiz · · Score: 1
      Had AT+T successfully exerted central control, do you think Unix would have become popular?

      --Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

    3. Re:quick history leason by DeepHurtn! · · Score: 1
      All because AT&T did not think to guard their original IP by copyrighting it. Then allowed several groups to modify it without central control.

      I'm curious -- how is that a bad thing? Would the overall state of computing really be better if Unix had been locked down and none of the variants were ever even started? I'm seeing this story as being about the benefits of *not* copyrighting and patenting everything.

    4. Re:quick history leason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Would the overall state of computing really be better if Unix had been locked down and none of the variants were ever even started?

      Superior OSes like VMS and OS/400 would still be viable. Compatibility would be less, cost would be greater. The industry would be far more diverse than the midrange monoculture Unix left us.

      Unix, like Windows, was built on the "Worse is Better" model, except that it mostly got its ass kicked in that department.

    5. Re:quick history leason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No no no nope. First of all, it was stated in the article. Secondly, it is common knowledge to people who lived and watched the nightly news with Walter Cronkite in those times that the gubbmint used to actively prevent tech monopolies in the public interest. This is not to say there were no monopolies, but new ones were monitored closely and shot to hell if they looked active and this was the case of AT&T.
      It wasn't about whether it was copyrighted or even patented. They were under order, just like Xerox, to share their technology. This wasn't a mistake or an oversight. They were FORCED by the government.

    6. Re:quick history leason by beakburke · · Score: 1

      AT&T COULDN'T sell unix at the time (read the article), thats why it was bascially given away to the universities to start with.

      --
      ----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
    7. Re:quick history leason by beakburke · · Score: 1

      Unix is to OSs as Democracy is to political systems. It is the worst kind, except compared to all the others.

      --
      ----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
    8. Re:quick history leason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Let's use an anology.
      Let's say years after prohibition is lifted in the US a kid might read about the vast prison population that consisted of drug offenders. Now, let's say the kid doesn't undertstand the role of the police in this and he says well all those people were in jail because they forgot wheere they were going and walked into cells and the door locked.
      That's pretty absurd right? That's about how absurd it is to pretend that the reason that AT&T shared its technology was because they forgot they had spent millions of dollars to develop it. There is not fucking way they simply didn't notice. They were forced like when a cop forces you to put your hands against the car and spread your legs for a frisk. That's no fucking accident.

    9. Re:quick history leason by Tony-A · · Score: 0

      Ho boy!
      I'm curious -- how is that a bad thing?

      It's not. If you consider Unix a good thing.

    10. Re:quick history leason by jadavis · · Score: 1

      But Linus has a trademark on the term "Linux". He could probably prevent you from calling your forked OS "Linux" is he wanted to.

      --
      Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
    11. Re:quick history leason by Lord+Kano · · Score: 1

      And what's to stop you from calling your fork "Linux based"?

      As much as I may hate to delve into Stallman like anal retentiveness, Linux is not the OS, it's just the kernel.

      LK

      --
      "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
    12. Re:quick history leason by Detritus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      UNIX was protected by copyrights, licenses and trade secrets. AT&T had plenty of lawyers. You needed a source license from AT&T to get the BSD source, as it was plainly a derivative work. AT&T did protect their IP. Thet just had liberal licensing terms, assuming that you had the money for the licenses. They had no desire to exercise "central control" over their licensees, which is a good thing. There were solid legal reasons for the way AT&T licensed UNIX, which are too complicated to go into here.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    13. Re:quick history leason by jadavis · · Score: 1

      Nothing. I think a name means a lot, and Linus is able to protect that name and the products associated with Linux to an extent.

      And yeah, it's just the kernel. I thought that's what this thread was talking about: a linux fork.

      --
      Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
    14. Re:quick history leason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Someone should let the industry know that OS/400 is not viable anymore, because people keep buying it and IBM keeps improving it.

    15. Re:quick history leason by ggwood · · Score: 1

      karmagardless wrote: This was done at Bell Labs on their dime. They let Berkley, and some others, have copies to evaluate and improve, thus causing BSD, and other variants. ...and it wasn't just Unix that Bell Labs was paying for. It was one of the greatest places to do physics for decades. I've recently started to study biophysics and many, perhaps half, the most significant founding papers from the 50's and 60's were written by people in large, for-profit companies. Some working in "the physics department" or "the chemistry department" in, say, GM or Dupont.

      Obviously, the consumer was paying for all this, in the end.

      I'm not saying it was better or that we should go back to that era; clearly fundamental research is still done at Universities - and maybe that is where is belongs I don't care to argue that point. It is just interesting to note that it happened - and it is happening to a far, far lesser ammount now. (I have spoken to a physicist working for GM now and I know how closely the science they do relates to products they sell - in stark contrast to the past).

      I imagine it similar to the drug industry today. The US pay exorbitant prices for drugs fueling rapid progress which benefits the entire world. Except instead of paying a bit more for paint, a car or a phone call, people now are loosing health insurance and thus going untreated - and ultimately dying - for scientific advances which actually are patented and the sale of which fuels corporate profits - instead of lots of science in which many advances were given away.
      ___________________________________________

      --
      a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
    16. Re:quick history leason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      todays chinese fire drill

      what's a chinese fire drill?

    17. Re:quick history leason by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      I thought you needed a source license from AT&T to get the BSD source because it contained AT&T code, and then they came up with the -lite version specifically to avoid that problem?

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    18. Re:quick history leason by Detritus · · Score: 1
      Correct. That's a derivative work. They started with the AT&T source and made extensive modifications and additions. Eventually, they eliminated all of the original AT&T source code.

      Back in the 4.2BSD days, I looked into getting a copy of the source code for my employer. It wasn't expensive, but you had to have an AT&T source license, which was very expensive for a commercial user.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  5. How things have changed.... by Savet+Hegar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I miss the old-time mentality of things. People like this developed things because it made sense. They didn't file for 20+ patents a day. They didn't litigate against companies working on a project with similar goals. It's too bad companies (like SCO) can't spend their time developing something useful instead of sueing the companies that are truly doing something good for the IT community.

    --
    Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
    1. Re:How things have changed.... by rf0 · · Score: 1, Redundant

      WHy spend time on development when you can hire lawyers to sue people so you can make money that way

      Rus

      --
      Cheap UK and US VPS
    2. Re:How things have changed.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perhaps they started to sue when more people graduated as lawyers than was needed, creating unemployed lawyers, to survive they looked at what they could do to get some work and came up with the sue business model.

      solution, make law school smaller :)

    3. Re:How things have changed.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Savet, you're missing the point. The legal system is what changed. The companies always wanted to patent everything under the sun. It's just that after the last Great Depression laws were put in place to discourage patents. Those laws were slowly eroded in the name of "free markets".
      Not only did the laws change, the legal system itself was changed. The Reagan revolution brought in a new court system called the CAFC that specficially encouraged monopolistic patents.
      This is not about the "old-time mentality" this is about the government of the US being hijacked by extremists and the astounding apathy that allowed it to happen.

    4. Re:How things have changed.... by Ben+Hutchings · · Score: 1
      They didn't file for 20+ patents a day.

      *snort* Unix development was funded as the basis for a typesetting system for the patent department of AT&T! Still, they didn't file a load of patents on their software - the setuid bit is the only patented Unix feature I'm aware of.

  6. The funny thing is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    UNIX wouldn't be where it were today if it weren't for patents. Not because patents were useful in the development, or because the initial C/UNIX technology was patented-- it wasn't-- but because about the first commercial sale of UNIX, the first big test case where things were ironed out, was in processing applications for the united states patent department.

    1. Re:The funny thing is by cheesybagel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It was a word processor. I am certain they could find other uses for a word processor than a patent office.

    2. Re:The funny thing is by Rysc · · Score: 3, Informative

      The article is incorrrect, it was not a word processor. It was text formatting/processing (think troff, etc.) in preperation for printing. Processing did happen, and it did process words, but to say that what they developed was a "Word Processor" is misleading at best. It wasn't even a text editor, what they developed was in a different category.

      --
      I want my Cowboyneal
    3. Re:The funny thing is by nutznboltz · · Score: 1

      Where is it written that Word Processor = WYSIWYG?

    4. Re:The funny thing is by DunbarTheInept · · Score: 2, Informative

      A word processor has both editing and displaying components. It doesn't have to be WYSIWYG, but it does have to have SOMETHING that lets the user edit the text. The program in question didn't have that. It was a text markup and displayer only. The text had to be edited on some other software.

      --

      Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.

  7. UNIX was meant as a hoax by tijsvd · · Score: 5, Funny
    Read this article:

    Creators admit UNIX, C hoax

    1. Re:UNIX was meant as a hoax by Metteyya · · Score: 1

      Nothing new, if you remember famous interview with Bjarne Stoustroup about C++.

    2. Re:UNIX was meant as a hoax by Repton · · Score: 1

      Yeah, and they let Bjarne Stroustrup in on the joke back when he was starting out...

      --
      Repton.
      They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
  8. I sure am glad times have changed by xiando · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "The first version of Unix was written by Dr Thompson for the PDP-7, a computer made by the Digital Equipment Corporation, which cost a mere $72,000, and came with eight kilobytes of memory, and a hard disk a bit smaller than a megabyte. " This was 30 years ago. I sure am glad a computer capable of running Linux can be bought for 1/100, or $720, these days...

    --
    9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
    1. Re:I sure am glad times have changed by mrchaotica · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, if you don't care about compiling KDE, you can get a used one capable of running Linux for 1/1000, or $72, these days...

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    2. Re:I sure am glad times have changed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or in my case, salvaged out of a trash bin along with the floppy diskettes later used to install Debian.

    3. Re:I sure am glad times have changed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How are you going to be a s|_|p3r l33t Gentoy user with that setup? I bet it doesn't even have blue cold cathode lights in the case!

  9. #include "reading/skills.h" by nacturation · · Score: 0

    From the article:

    Just south of the town's centre lies a huge complex of buildings which, despite its size, looks fairly unprepossessing, boring as only business parks in the suburbs can be.

    Am I the only one who read that as unpreprocessing?

    --
    Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
    1. Re:#include "reading/skills.h" by arief_mulya · · Score: 0

      Nope.
      Same here :-)

    2. Re:#include "reading/skills.h" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep, i did

  10. Re:The article by AuMatar · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    If you're going to karma whore, please keep the paragraph breaks.

    --
    I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
  11. Dear Dennis by bigberk · · Score: 4, Funny

    i have never hurd of this C language, is it like C# or ASP ? I think it is very complicated and doesnt work with modern OOP models. my comp sci teacher says it has acadehmic value but the 1970s are over the language porbably doesnt have use in modern computers?

    1. Re:Dear Dennis by Kethinov · · Score: 2, Funny

      You disturb me, sir.

      --
      You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
    2. Re:Dear Dennis by condensate · · Score: 1

      Ummm. Let's say C# is like C. Your comp sci teacher misses the point that virtually all relevant OSes are somehow coded in C or a dialect thereof. So there is not only an academic value to it, it is a real world language, and it is NOT OO. For computational science, I would use C++ though, which is closely linked to C but has OO features.

      --
      Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
    3. Re:Dear Dennis by johannesg · · Score: 2, Funny

      Heh. I especially love the way you misspelled "acadehmic", it really adds something to the post ;-)

    4. Re:Dear Dennis by Kethinov · · Score: 1

      Dude, chill. The grandparent is a joke. A sick and deeply sarcastic one, but still a joke. I hope.

      --
      You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
    5. Re:Dear Dennis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wowsers, some of the replies to this post really miss the sarcasm. The fact that they tried to answer this question seriously must mean that C# actually is a language worthy of recognition....else why dignify this post with a response? Interesting, MS actually does something right for once....

    6. Re:Dear Dennis by che.kai-jei · · Score: 1

      the only truly disturbing thing is that even in england computer science has forked into 'computing' which takes that approach. c++ is only used to teach coding basics and then java and uml taught by rote and even computer science is becoming like that. this i could understand in the corporate sponsored market driven university system in usa. where the big guys calll the shots and therefore only the buzzwords are espoused and the student is a client and therefore wants the most employability for his education dollar and sees that the computing trends and buzz technologies are his / her priority.

      whatver happend to academia and sheer interst? doies everone really want to be a technician or batch coder?

    7. Re:Dear Dennis by Kethinov · · Score: 1

      I'm personally planning to become a teacher, specifically of a technical nature with regards to computers, and the more time I spend in the U.S. college system the more I wonder if I should just get a job teaching English or computer basics in high schools instead of seeking a professorship for the sake of preserving my ability to teach a competent curriculum. It's either that or move another country which doesn't have these problems.

      --
      You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
    8. Re:Dear Dennis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      whatver happend to academia and sheer interst? doies everone really want to be a technician or batch coder?

      Well see what they're trying to do is devalue the job of coding (for the corporate world) thus causing first-world developers to charge less for their services and thus allowing them to compete with India. OTOH, once outsourcing really gets into gear, all that will be left for you people will be sheer "interst" and academia. HA!

    9. Re:Dear Dennis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sometimes, I swear there should be a '-1, Completely Missed the Point', moderation option.

    10. Re:Dear Dennis by condensate · · Score: 1

      Yep and with a catastrophic orthography, but come on, there are programming languages which are worth fighting for...

      --
      Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
    11. Re:Dear Dennis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ummm. Let's say C# is like C. Your comp sci teacher misses the point that virtually all relevant OSes are somehow coded in C or a dialect thereof.

      Your responce is very, very, very disturbing. Mentally stable Slashdotters shake their head in utter disbelief seeing you respond in detail as to why "the comp sci teacher misses the point". Some Slashdotters will need guidance to recover from what is a shocking insight into some of the disturbingly shallow psyche lurking and manifesting on Slashdot.

      You go sit in a corner now, make yourself very tiny, avoid all eye contact and put a thumb in your mouth whilst sucking on it. Then, contemplate on how your brains grew into your way of thinking process. There still is hope my friend, but your road to recovery seems to be a long and hard one.

      This was a joke.

    12. Re:Dear Dennis by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 1

      You're too hard on him. I think that missing the point and/or explaining the joke always makes it much funnier.

      --
      Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
    13. Re:Dear Dennis by frank_adrian314159 · · Score: 1
      I especially love the way you misspelled "acadehmic"...

      I'm sure he meant to type "acaduhmic". But, in any case, the post was a high point of my day, humor-wise. My hat's off to the original poster.

      --
      That is all.
    14. Re:Dear Dennis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


      i have never hurd of this C language, is it like C# or ASP ? I think it is very complicated and doesnt work with modern OOP models. my comp sci teacher says it has acadehmic value but the 1970s are over the language porbably doesnt have use in modern computers?

      Waaaay too much Microsoft at that school of yours.

      Sad isn't it, that Computer Science teachers fail to understand the value of small and tight code, instead foisting the barbarous mess that is unreadable, unreusable, bloated code and binaries, we call the OO paradigm.

      DOWN WITH OOP! :)

  12. UNIX forever? by Proc6 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This article seems as fitting as any to ask a question that always rolls around in my mind. While the beginning of my own computing career was in IRIX and Solaris, and now with most of my time spent on Windows machines I, of course, still understand UNIXs power and miss working with it daily.

    But I guess I'm curious as to why nearly all OS focus is on UNIX or a derivative? From Linus's knock off, to Mac moving to a UNIX core to even the pretty original BeOS. Why are we reinventing the wheel and not coming up with something completely new?

    This is not a troll, I am just looking for the various opinions. Is UNIX the basis for everything non-Microsoft because it's the pinnacle of perfection? Or, like movie plots, did 1 person invent a good thing and everyone else just replicates it with their own flare? It seems to me by now we might have 20/20 hindsight, a whole lot of real world usage and a completely new operating system based on "nothing" might be even better? I've heard of course the "because as soon as you have UNIX, you have access to a zillion packages that port easily", which is great, but frankly, does it matter that I can get X's little "Eyes" app running under my new BobIX OS in under 15 minutes? Maybe writing a completely new "Eyes" under a new OS could be as fast or faster than a UNIX port to a UNIX OS if the new OS was built right? The UNIX filesystem is a mess, that's always bothered me. I dont know, again, not a troll, UNIX rocks - just wondering why there isn't (or if there is?) any group out there writing completely new from the ground up without using UNIX as their model?

    --

    I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!

    1. Re:UNIX forever? by joeykiller · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I dont know, again, not a troll, UNIX rocks - just wondering why there isn't (or if there is?) any group out there writing completely new from the ground up without using UNIX as their model?
      I don't know if this is satifying enough for you, but check out ReactOS. These guys are writing a Windows NT 4 clone from the ground up. Granted, they're not starting from scratch with entirely new ideas, but at least they're satisfying your demand of writing an OS "without using UNIX as their model".
    2. Re:UNIX forever? by skyman8081 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes, I agree, that the UNIX'y way of things is showing it's age.

      I mean, there have been some really good efforts to de-unixify unix, such as the STEP's (NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, Rhapsody, OS X)
      how many normal users are going to figure out what /bin /usr /var /etc /sbin mean?
      I know a at least two Linux distros that are going to attempt to fix this, GenSTEP and Komodo

      from what I have seen and heard from the developers, the release looks to be very promising in terms of leaving behind the old timey UNIX guts, and looking like a modern, well designed OS.

      SHAMELESS PLUG TERMINATED

      --
      Two Roommates and a Boyfriend, updates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
    3. Re:UNIX forever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But I guess I'm curious as to why nearly all OS focus is on UNIX or a derivative?

      Simple answer: It's standardized, everyone learns it in school, and it's the cheapest thing this side of just OEMing Windows.

    4. Re:UNIX forever? by smallguy78 · · Score: 0

      i like the way you have to tread on eggshells when even a sniff of criticism for unix + descendents is brought up on /. :o)

      --
      Nothing costs nothing
    5. Re:UNIX forever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Obviously, the GrandParent isn't New Here ;-) And he seems, (for one) to be welcoming his insensitive Unix-loving CLOD!! overlords from Soviet Russia, whose inodes are belong to us.

    6. Re:UNIX forever? by zyche · · Score: 1

      People are following Unix because the Unix-model is actually pretty close to TheRightWayToDoThings. Atleast considering what we know today, or what we want to accomplish today.

      But it is important to remember that not all unices are alike, and hence they doesn't share the exact same model! For example, ACL:s exists in some variants but not in others. Security has become a (somewhat) prioritized feature these days, but is implemented very differently. Some unices has elaborate /proc filesystems while other doesn't. And so on.

      If you think about it, what do you want an operating system to do? Execute programs, receive and send data, store data permanently; all of this in a easy, safe and deterministic way. Thats why Microsoft will have a hard time to convince people to upgrade to the latest version of Windows: the introduction of Windows 2000 was the first version that actually executed programs in a somewhat safe way - you doesn't have to reboot the computer several times a day due to crashes. What more do you want?

      Unix pretty much had those features from the beginning, thats why people have sticked to it. If it works, don't fix it. And if it partially works, why reinvent the whole wheel when only a part needs a redesign?

      And yes, the Unix filesystem hierarchy mess if probably one of the reasons why it sometimes are considered somewhat archaic. The problem is that there are so many schools of what to call things, where to place programs and data, so that if you install a few different software packages their parts will wind up in very different locations (look at a default install of Solaris for example). A lot of directories are kept because of backwards compatibility.

      Anyway, it's better than the Stuff-It-In-C:\Windows mentality...

    7. Re:UNIX forever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OBJECTIVITY ALERT

      Anyway, it's better than the Stuff-It-In-C:\Windows mentality...

      Ummm, The Windows folder is further subdivided Drivers, Config, Command, Help, System, System32, Java, Compressed Temporary Files and lord knows what else. Surprisingly, these names are comprehnsible to humans. Without having to look at a manpage. Lets abuse Windows for the right reasons, not for frikkin' directory names. Being zealot doesn't get you very far in life.....only about as far as the World Trade Centre....

    8. Re:UNIX forever? by defsdoor · · Score: 1

      Because by pure fluke or genius they got it right.

    9. Re:UNIX forever? by Alomex · · Score: 1

      There are several answers to this about why most OSes are Unix derivatives.

      For one, Unix got a lot of things right, right from the beginning. Second, some of those that it missed became the standard when added later (tcp/ip, threads). Third, writing an OS is a major undertaking, somewhere in the order of thousands of man-years. "Borrowing" ideas from another OS can help reduce this start up time. Lastly, lack of imagination. We teach our young geeks that linux/unix is the end-all and be-all and guess what? they cannot come up with anything else new. Rather we should adopt a philosophy among the OS and OSS communities that "Unix is very good, but by all means suggest something better if you think you can".

      If we did this, X would have been fixed long ago (fixed in the Burroughs Algol version 1 sense if you know what I mean). KDE and Gnome would be a lot closer to prime time than they are, and we would have many more innovative concepts originating in the OSS comunity.

    10. Re:UNIX forever? by ewe2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      To help answer your question (and it's a damn good one), I'd make two observations:

      1. It's more than just one great idea or a collection of great ideas. It's all of those and a synergy between them. To beat it you have to more than replicate, but surpass that kind of synergy. It's a good reason why people have preferred to build on the core ideas rather than replace them.
      2. Very few real resources are being put into OS research any more. Rob Pike put it best, but in a nutshell, there's no money in it, and it's really hard stuff. Sure, you may fantasize about an OS that allows, say, manipulation of data by pointing at images in the air, but if it can be realized, then it'll be an interface to a UNIX-like OS, because the cost of developing something completely different on the basis of an interface is prohibitive in money and man-hours, at least in the prevailing climate.

      Hope that helped some, I appreciate your dilemma though, I think about it a lot myself.

      --
      insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
    11. Re:UNIX forever? by brunns · · Score: 2, Insightful

      OS/400 (the OS of the AS/400, no, sorry, the iSeries, no, sorry, the i5) isn't much like any other operating system I know of. All the unicies and Windows all feel like variations on a theme in comparison.

      --

      If you moderate me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
    12. Re:UNIX forever? by JustinXB · · Score: 1
      Check out Plan 9 from Bell Labs. It was designed by some of the people who worked on the original UNIX. It was designed to fix the problems they saw with UNIX. However, it is not based on UNIX. It's a great little OS that is sadly little known.

      You can also check out Inferno. It's a cousin of Plan 9. It keeps most of the ideas of Plan 9 while adding many that have since been ported back to Plan 9. It's a virtual machine that can run on top of OSes or natively on hardware. It has it's own language, Limbo, that runs in the virtual machine and is truly cross-platform.

      Both can be downloaded freely.

    13. Re:UNIX forever? by Dante · · Score: 1

      Plan 9 http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/

      --
      "think of it as evolution in action"
    14. Re:UNIX forever? by pthisis · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But I guess I'm curious as to why nearly all OS focus is on UNIX or a derivative? From Linus's knock off, to Mac moving to a UNIX core to even the pretty original BeOS. Why are we reinventing the wheel and not coming up with something completely new?

      This is not a troll, I am just looking for the various opinions. Is UNIX the basis for everything non-Microsoft because it's the pinnacle of perfection? Or, like movie plots, did 1 person invent a good thing and everyone else just replicates it with their own flare?

      Unix is 3 things, an OS implementation (AT&T Unix code), an OS family (Unix, BSD, Linux, etc), and a philosophy.

      The implementation obviously changes with every member of the family, so I assume your question is something like "are we sure the Unix philosophy is good, and why do we keep reimplementing that instead of improving it?"

      The philosophy comes down to a couple of ideas which are pretty well articulated these days (everything is a file, do one thing well, etc), but they weren't written down or even well-considered at the time the original implementation was written. They weren't even strictly adhered to (ioctls, anyone?), but even the original managed to stick to them most of the time.

      That philosophy can be refined and extended, as was done with Plan 9.

      Indeed, some MAJOR improvements have been introduced under the radar in modern Unices. Linux 2.6, for instance, has per-process namespaces, which is an incredible step forward that isn't well understood by the community at large but will be someday soon. /proc seems like a trivial enough idea, but it is a step Plan 9 took toward getting to "everything is a file". Having threads and processes both as particular instances of a more general context of execution is a huge change to the Unix core, but it's also pretty much an accepted idea nowadays.

      In fact, so much has changed that I would argue the question is somewhat spurious. We keep implementing Unix because "Unix" keeps changing and evolving.

      It isn't simply implementation details; the process model, namespace, and filesysem are all very different beasts philosophically and theoretically on a modern Linux OS from what they were in Unix 10 years ago.

      Think about this: with ReiserFS, you not only have things like journalling and wandering logs, but you have efficient small files and attributes, atomic updates to the fs, and other things that make replacing the database with the filesystem and other dramatic user-level changes much more appealing. In fact, the Unix-style directory tree is just a plugin in ReiserFS.

      With the clone() system call, you can create execution contexts that share memory, file descriptors, file system namespaces, signal handlers, etc. You can share all, some, or none of those things. Traditional Unix processes (and the more recent thread concept) are just specific instances of a newer and very innovative replacement. Indeed, fork() is just a wrapper around clone.

      The list goes on, but the point is simple: all of the core OS components are dramatically different from what they were in Unix, and I mean that at an OS theory level, not a mere implementation level.

      In other words, real, core innovation is happening inside the Unix family. There are, in fact, actively developed non-Unix OSes; Hurd, Plan 9, and Xandos come to mind. They aren't amazingly popular, but they do have some support. I honestly think the real reason they aren't amazingly popular is that the kind of innovation that a ground-up OS rewrite allows IS actually actively done inside of the Unix family as well.

      --
      rage, rage against the dying of the light
    15. Re:UNIX forever? by kikta · · Score: 1

      I'm confused. Are you complaining about doing things in a UNIX-like way, or about FHS?

      I agree that Joe Sixpack would run screaming from figuring out FHS, but that doesn't mean that we need to get rid of concepts like pipes, using text for inter-process communication, and treating everything as a file. I think these are things that programmers enjoy and, simultaneously, thing that Joe doesn't ever need to know or care about.

      I'm honestly curious, are you saying we should hide the UNIX-ness (ala OS X) or dump it altogether?

    16. Re:UNIX forever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Novel OSes. Most research is currently being done on capability-based OSes, not Unix-based OSes.

    17. Re:UNIX forever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      The OP was referring to the habit of programs in Windows of installing everything either in the windows\system directory (potentially breaking other applications in the process), or in the program's own directory.

      In Unix, you have platform-dependent binaries in bin, libraries in lib, platform-independent files in share, runtime data in var, temporaries in tmp, user data in /home etc. This structure lends itself well to the possibility of having different subtrees living on different physical locations or devices (/usr contains read-only data, while /var, /tmp, /home contain read/write data, so you may want different devices and mount options for them; in a heterogenous environment, you want to share platform-independent stuff (/usr/share) from a single file server, but provide a distinct /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc. for each architecture etc. So, the *ix filesystem structure was designed with scalability and heterogenity in mind (although Plan9 excels in this area).

      The Windows filesystem layout lacks such concepts. From my experience I can tell that this leads to much greater "messiness", especially in large, heterogenous file-sharing networks. Windows programs essentially just dump all their files, including binaries, libraries, documentation, configuration etc. into their own single program directory. The registry is, by and large, a failure. "drive letters" are the single most stupid concept ever invented... The "home directory" vs. "Profile directory (located under c:\Windows)" mess in Windows is incomprehensible even for users willing to learn (e.g. me).

      Being zealot doesn't get you very far in life.....only about as far as the World Trade Centre....

      You forgot to mention the Nazis :-)

    18. Re:UNIX forever? by justins · · Score: 1

      So you think that a clone of NT, which in turn is a clone of VMS, is a reasonable choice for a user who is looking for something completely new? Mmmkay.

      --
      Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
    19. Re:UNIX forever? by oudzeeman · · Score: 1

      "Why are we reinventing the wheel and not coming up with something completely new?" Coming up with something new IS reinventing the wheel. Basing something off well a well understood base is more efficient. Gradual improvements are good, re-writing a complex system from scratch rarely gets you ahead. Apple tried to write a replacement for the original Mac OS from scratch and failed - So they bought Next.

    20. Re:UNIX forever? by IonYz · · Score: 1
      But I guess I'm curious as to why nearly all OS focus is on UNIX or a derivative? From Linus's knock off, to Mac moving to a UNIX core to even the pretty original BeOS.

      The BeOS may be POSIX compliant and use Bash as a shell but it is in no way a UNIX or a derivative. A shell was included at some point because users wanted it. The GUI was not built nor based off X11. The last publicly released version didn't even have a concept of users/groups with a mysterious entity known as Baron owning all files!

      Earlier version of Mac OS inspired Jean-Louis Gassee and team to create the BeOS. Not surprising seeing as how more then a few members were ex-Apple employees.

    21. Re:UNIX forever? by joeykiller · · Score: 1

      He didn't ask for something completely new. He asked if there was an OS project being built from the ground up that wasn't based on Unix.

      ReactOS meets that demand.

    22. Re:UNIX forever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I know at least two Linux distros that are going to attempt to fix this, GenSTEP and Komodo

      There's also Gobolinux.

  13. If only this were true! by Savet+Hegar · · Score: 1

    LOL

    Can you imagine SCO going into court and having IBM/Redhat/Autozone/Etc point out that their "holy IP" started as a joke?

    --
    Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
  14. Alternate Perspective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    "A junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s"
    -- Dave Cutler

    1. Re:Alternate Perspective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The opinion of a respected and successful OS Architect, equal in stature to Ritchie, is trolling? Once again slashdot censors diverse viewpoints.

    2. Re:Alternate Perspective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As opposed to a junk OS designed by a committee of PHB's

      Yeah, you sure did some fine work there Dave. Shame everyone else as Microsoft dumped their bowels all over it.

    3. Re:Alternate Perspective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For a second I thought it said 'Coulter'...

    4. Re:Alternate Perspective by aprosumer.slashdot · · Score: 1

      Cutler was the original architect of NT.

  15. I Just Hope... by zenmojodaddy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    RMS doesn't read the bit about Linus deciding to write a UNIX-like operating system from scratch.

    *listens carefully, hears distant wailing and gnashing of teeth*

    Oh dear.

    1. Re:I Just Hope... by oddtodd · · Score: 1

      that was the only part of the article that was wrong.
      RMS gets shorted often because it's too easy to lump the FSF/GNU work under the linux rubric, which is why RMS likes the GNU/Linux nomenclature.

      --
      I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
    2. Re:I Just Hope... by zenmojodaddy · · Score: 1

      I can see why RMS prefers GNU/Linux - after all, it must be pretty galling to see someone else given sole credit for work that many others have had a hand in, particularly if you were the one who set the project in motion.

      But... it seems inconsistent to insist on the one hand that all software must be absolutely Free to do with as you please, but also insist very strictly on a specific name for that software.

    3. Re:I Just Hope... by UserGoogol · · Score: 1

      You're free to call your it whatever you want, but if you don't call it GNU/Linux, you suck and RMS won't like you.

      --
      "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
  16. designers by pchan- · · Score: 2, Interesting

    the real question is, what is that programming language they have over ritchie's image? it's certainly not c. i've never seen it before, but it looks pretty lame.

    1. Re:designers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Possibly PL/1 or BCPL, the predecessor of B.

    2. Re:designers by pjt33 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Googling the keywords highlighted in yellow turns up a Filepro developer's reference, a Recital/4GL reference, and a page which is so badly formatted I didn't try reading it. Removing "clears" from the search brings up a lot FoxPro pages.

    3. Re:designers by bhima · · Score: 1

      I saw that And decided it was some sort of ancient non-language, that typesetters use to the take place of real source when they don't have any.

      --
      Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
  17. I didn't RTFA because... by john_smith_45678 · · Score: 5, Funny
    The Genesis of Unix is already included in the Unix Bible!

    The Bible According to Unix

    Genesis

    Chapter 0

    0. In the Beginning Ritchie created the PDP-11 and the UNIX.
    1. And the UNIX was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the system programmers.
    2. And Ritchie said, "Let there be portability!" And nothing happened, so Ritchie realized that he had his work cut out for him.
    .
    25. And Ritchie said to Kernighan, "Let us make C in the image of B, after our own whims: and let it have dominion over the I and the O and all that runneth upon the UNIX," and it was almost, but not quite so... so he realized that he had his work cut out for him again.
    .

    Chapter 1

    0. Thus the PDP-11 and the UNIX were finished, and all the programs in them.
    1. And on the seventh shift Ritchie ended his work which he had made; and he would have rested on the seventh shift from all the work which he had made, if it weren't for the system crash.
    .

    Chapter 2

    0. 0 Now the COBOL was more verbose than any language of the PDP-11, and he said unto the programmer, "Yea, hath the Manual said, 'Ye shalt not read of every device of the network?'"
    1 And the programmer said unto the COBOL, "We may read of every device of the network:
    2 But of the registers of the printer in the midst of the network, the Manual hath said, 'Ye shall not read of it, neither shall ye write to it without proper protocol, lest ye cause a system crash.'"
    3 And the COBOL said unto the programmer, "Ye shalt not surely crash the system:
    4 For Ritchie doth know that in the time slice ye read thereof, then your I/O shall be opened, and ye shalt be as system operators, accessing locked accounts with unlimited privileges."
    5 And then when the programmer saw that the printer was good for interfacing, and that it was pleasant to the I (and to the O),...
    6 And they realized they were unstructured, so they patched RATFOR subroutines...
    .

    The Gospel

    0. And the Messiah shalt come, born a mere B but to grow up into the Saviour C,
    1. Wherein true structured programming may be achieved, yea, verily, yet while being able to do bit shifting.
    2. For although the Law (Pascal) hath been given, the Law cannot

    for (i=0; str1[i]!='\0'; i++)
    str2[i] += (str1[i]>='A' && str1[i]<='Z') ? 32 : 0;

    but must

    i := 0;
    while (i <= length(str1)) do
    begin
    if str1[i] in ['A'..'Z'] then
    str2[i] := chr( ord(str1[i]) + 32))
    else
    str1[i] := str2[i];
    i := i + 1;
    end;

    The Revelation

    0. Yea, in those last days, the Saviour shalt come again, but enhanced, in the rainment of C++
    1. And then shalt the Beast, FORTRAN, and the AntiC, COBOL, be thrown into the trash HEAP where there is weeping and byting of pins.
    2. And all the faithful programmers shalt be led into CRAY where billions of MIPS are at each one's fingertips
    --
    John Kerry is a Joke!
    1. Re:I didn't RTFA because... by DeKO · · Score: 2, Informative

      Please post a link to the original when you copy it to your post.

      http://www.neystadt.org/john/humor/The-C-Bible.htm

    2. Re:I didn't RTFA because... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cobol

      I am the Anti C, that is what I was meant to be. Your Ritchie left me behind and set my soul to be free.

  18. Mimicing Unix.... by Savet+Hegar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think the reason so many try to mimic unix is because it is already the industry standard. Linux handles things differently, but the end result is fairly transparent to the end user. So one can switch from a Unix system to a Linux system (or vice versa) and have a good grasp of how things work.

    With Linux being open source, and the BSD variants available as well, I don't see much of a need to reinvent the wheel. Not to flame Microsoft (though I definately never mind doing that), but they are living proof of what happens when a company tries to reinvent the wheel. You end up with an operating system that's insecure and prone to errors and crashes.

    One has to wonder how much more stable and secure Windows would be if they had instead focused on a proprietary desktop software for Unix, bringing the speed and stability of Unix to the home users' desktop.

    --
    Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
    1. Re:Mimicing Unix.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You end up with an operating system that's insecure and prone to errors and crashes.

      That describes UNIX for most of its history.

      If anything, both UNIX and WinNT prove that you really can polish a turd.

    2. Re:Mimicing Unix.... by tarunthegreat2 · · Score: 1

      One has to wonder how much more stable and secure Windows would be if they had instead focused on a proprietary desktop software for Unix, bringing the speed and stability of Unix to the home users' desktop.

      That's an interesting question, but what one really has to ask is what MS' financial position would be had it followed the above model.... probably nowhere, and that would mean that half of /. content would be lost (i.e. like the Is Windows XP faster than Linux? discussion, e.t.c.).

      --
      My Favourite Meme
  19. and thats when TUX by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    went in the future to inform Linus that he has to invent Linux.

    Therefore, thanks to a penguin with the car from back to the future, we have linux

  20. Article text from server by john_smith_45678 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
    UNIXWORLDWEEKLY 4/1 p.1

    In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:

    "In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their (Bell Labs) work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious Harvard Lampoon parody of the great Tolkein Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C, becoming the first programming language named after a Sesame Street character. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

    for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8) %2 ))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

    To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in Object Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."

    Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, Bull (formerly Honewell), and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, stating 'a stable VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.

    In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM spokesmen have begun denying once again that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an internal prank gone awry.

    --
    John Kerry is a Joke!
    1. Re:Article text from server by mccalli · · Score: 2, Funny
      for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2 ))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);
      To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension!

      And this was before Perl...

      Cheers,
      Ian

  21. Article Text (Non Karma-Whoring Edition) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    DIRECTLY west from the southernmost tip of Manhattan, a bit more than 15 miles away, lies the sleepy-looking suburban town of Murray Hill. Just south of the town's centre lies a huge complex of buildings which, despite its size, looks fairly unprepossessing, boring as only business parks in the suburbs can be. But a surprising portion of what passes for modern technology can be traced back to this site, the home of Bell Laboratories, now the research arm of Lucent, but previously that of AT&T, a big American telecoms firm. It was at the Labs, as they are known colloquially, that the transistor was invented in 1947, making possible solid-state computing and paving the way for the microchip.

    But the Labs were not only the birthplace, in this sense, of modern computer hardware. Much of modern software--computer programs and the special programming languages in which they are written--originated there too. Two instances in particular stand out: the programming language called C, which from the early 1970s has been perhaps the most popular programming language; and the Unix operating system, first booted up in 1971, and still going strong in everything from laptops to airline-reservation systems. Dennis Ritchie, who has worked at the Labs since 1967, was central to both projects. He is revered as the inventor of C, and, with Ken Thompson, as the co-inventor of Unix.

    However, both projects were, in fact, intensely collaborative. Dr Thompson had written C's immediate predecessor, a language known (logically enough) as B. And though Dr Thompson was the first person to work on Unix, Dr Ritchie and others, including Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike and Doug McIlroy (who headed the research group), were fundamental to its development. Dr Ritchie is the last of this group to remain at the Labs--at 62 he retains an aura of youthful enthusiasm. While others have departed for academia or newer companies, he is now the head of systems software research at Bell Labs, and is continuing his research into operating systems and languages.

    Dr Ritchie likes to emphasise that he was just one member of a group. With characteristic modesty, he suggests that many of the improvements he introduced when developing C simply "looked like a good thing to do". Anyone else in the same place at the same time, he implies, would have done the same thing. But Bjarne Stroustrup, who came to the Labs later and designed C++, a further improved version of C, disagrees. "If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn," he says.

    All the key participants recall the genesis of Unix and C, and the environment at Bell Labs, as something of an idyll. As Dr Kernighan says, "it was a remarkable collection of really outstanding people who were pretty well paid to do whatever they wanted, and most of them had really good taste about what to work on." Dr McIlroy later wrote that "so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations." Unix was not even given a name for more than a year after it was first invented. So much of what they did was done, initially, for themselves alone, sometimes for sheer amusement, and yet it has had a lasting legacy in the world outside. How did this happen, and what lessons follow for today's programmers?

    There we were, all in one place

    To answer this question, it is necessary, though difficult, to recall just how comparatively primitive the state of computing was 30 years ago. The first version of Unix was written by Dr Thompson for the PDP-7, a computer made by the Digital Equipment Corporation, which cost a mere $72,000, and came with eight kilobytes of memory, and a hard disk a bit smaller than a megabyte. By contrast, a desktop computer today typically costs a hundred times less, has roughly 64,000 times as much memory and a hard disk 40,000 times as big.

    That any software, albeit with many revisions and modifications, could have survived such changes and still be a core technology today is nothing short o

  22. The sad loss of the terminal room by Paul+Crowley · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Dr Pike says that the thing he misses most from the 1970s at Bell Labs was the terminal room. Because computers were rare at the time, people did not have them on their desks, but rather went to the room, one side of which was covered with whiteboards, and sat down at a random computer to work. The technical hub of the system became the social hub.

    Even /. readers occasionally want to see people face-to-face. Even if we're arranging meetings over IM and bringing WiFi laptops, let's occasionally try to set eyes on other geeks :-)

    --
    Xenu loves you!
    1. Re:The sad loss of the terminal room by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even /. readers occasionally want to see people face-to-face.

      Yeah :) well that's enough face stuff for today.

  23. Re:The article by honne · · Score: 2, Informative

    Recently I downloaded http://v6.cuzuco.com/ lion's Commentary to just understand original flavour. I salute the Gurus who wrote such a beautifull piece which still stands as "mother of all OSes".

  24. It's true! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Just look at Dennis Ritchie's Desktop (Real!)

    1. Re:It's true! by irokitt · · Score: 1

      My God, I could have gone my entire life without knowing that DMR uses WNT.

      --
      If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
    2. Re:It's true! by DunbarTheInept · · Score: 1

      Yah, but appearently he's just using it the same way he used a vt100.

      --

      Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.

  25. Pass that bong, dude by melted · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Unices were SO proprietary back in the day Microsoft is a child's play in comparison. Ever heard of FreeBSD and a lawsuit against them? UNIX systems used to cost a heck of a lot, and the entire UNIX world was thoroughly licensed and lawyer-infested. On top of that UNIX companies used to fight each other and pull "embrace and extend" thing when on the surface the system would remain POSIX compatible, but to use its advanced features you'd have to sell your soul to the devil and go entirely incompatible with everything else.

    MS entered server market precisely because of this situation. It was a low cost, no hassle alternative to UNIX that was good enough for small and medium businesses.

    1. Re:Pass that bong, dude by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Talking about MS: Do you remember XENIX?

    2. Re:Pass that bong, dude by rmayes100 · · Score: 1

      I blame the whole situation with Unix in the late 70's and 80's for the reason DOS and later Windows became the dominate desktop operating system. Unix was simply too expensive for the home/small business user. Anyone know how much a copy of Microsoft's Xenix cost back in the day? I assume if MS could have sold it cheaply they would have stuck with Xenix instead of moving to DOS. I also blame the cost of Unix for the screwed up DOS command line syntax. I assume DOS (based off of CP/M?) was made just different enough (ie '\' instead of '/' etc) from Unix to not incure a Unix license fee from whoever had the rights to Unix back then.

    3. Re:Pass that bong, dude by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      I remember Xenix, I ran it well after SCO got their hands on it on my 286-6MHz with 1MB ram and a 40MB RLL disk. It was quite a tidy little OS, which explains why microsoft got rid of it.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  26. Does anyone know.. by sfraggle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just what programming language is the code in this image written in? You'd think for Unix they'd use C or bourne shell, but it seems apparently not..

    --
    were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
    1. Re:Does anyone know.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The original unix didn't have bourne shell. The thing that people call C shell is the closest there is to the original unix shell. Bourne shell came with the 7th ed unix. Bill Joy got a hold of the 6th ed unix shell, added job control and some other stuff, and called it C shell.

    2. Re:Does anyone know.. by lachlan76 · · Score: 1

      My first impression was Visual Basic, but on more careful inspection (return statements, := operator), I'd guess Pascal. I don't know pascal though, so could someone tell me if I'm right?

    3. Re:Does anyone know.. by MnO-BF · · Score: 3, Informative

      Looks like it has something to do with filePro. The code is from the library on this page: http://www.aljex.com/bkw/filepro/

    4. Re:Does anyone know.. by ggvaidya · · Score: 1

      Most of the code at the right comes from this image: http://www.aljex.com/fp/vim/unix.gif

    5. Re:Does anyone know.. by sfraggle · · Score: 1

      The top of the image says its written by "Brian K White".. does anyone else think that maybe the people writing the article searched for something like "Brian K code" in an attempt to find source code related to Unix?

      --
      were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
    6. Re:Does anyone know.. by innot · · Score: 2, Interesting
      No, but I think the designer just googled for "unix" images and took the first image that looked cryptic enough for him.

      --
      X IMPRIMITE "SALVE TERRA!"
      XX ITE AD X
    7. Re:Does anyone know.. by SirPhreak · · Score: 1

      The gent who said FilePro is correct... a great DB which a company I previously worked for ran. Built the whole company from the ground up on it in the 80's on a old radioshack xenix box. Now runs on a decent a SCO Unix box flawlessly with about 6 secretaries remotely logged in doing their work, processing orders, etc. Its great

      --
      ------------------------------ SirPhreak - "It's Thinking..."
    8. Re:Does anyone know.. by 44BSD · · Score: 1
      /* You are not expected to understand this */
      ...would have been funny
  27. Re:The article by phantasma6 · · Score: 1

    I know... whoops :S

  28. Bare facts by Decaff · · Score: 4, Funny

    Amazingly, it ran without an embedded browser and media player.

    1. Re:Bare facts by Decaff · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yea, and your mother sucks cock without her two front teeth. What's your point bitch?

      That developers in those days could (like my mother apparently) do a hell of a lot with few resources.

    2. Re:Bare facts by puppetman · · Score: 1

      Wow - do you have "Loser" tattooed on your forehead, or do you let your personality announce the fact?

      Instead of posting on /. why not go outside your double-wide, and get some of those rusted-out cars towed off your front lawn.

    3. Re:Bare facts by Decaff · · Score: 1

      Wow - do you have "Loser" tattooed on your forehead, or do you let your personality announce the fact?

      The personality does it every time.

      Instead of posting on /. why not go outside your double-wide, and get some of those rusted-out cars towed off your front lawn.

      Because I like them there. They are artistic, and attract wildlife.

  29. Re:SCO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Yeah, especially since the article states " Linux is also the true heir of the Unix tradition in the sense that its development process is collaborative. "

    Clearly SCO has a business-model patent on Unix-like development!

  30. Yeah but by grouse · · Score: 1

    The concept is hardly "completely new from the ground up" even if the implementation is.

  31. Bragging... by Tore+S+B · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Allright, allright, I'm bragging, but... I have a PDP-7!
    Don't believe me? My pics.
    Please don't link to the main site, though, it's very much under construction.

    --
    toresbe
    1. Re:Bragging... by tarunthegreat2 · · Score: 1

      Smart move bud....slashdot your own site...Somebody set up us a mirror please, because all this guy's bandwidht are belong to Slashdot clearly.

      --
      My Favourite Meme
    2. Re:Bragging... by Tore+S+B · · Score: 2, Funny

      It's pretty high-bandwidth. I also have a mirror at the University of Oslo - here.
      I'm moving the site to that server, but there's still a lot to smooth out. That server can take anything :)

      --
      toresbe
    3. Re:Bragging... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      sweet. In focus pics would be useful and some details of the restoration project.

    4. Re:Bragging... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny
      That server can take anything :)

      Famous last words...

  32. Dear Sir by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Please go away and come back again in 200000 Slashdot User IDs time, when you might understand the concepts of "a joke" and "a troll". Until then, please refrain from posting.

    Yours,

    The Association of Slashdot Posters

  33. Unix WAS patented, which is WHY it spread by js7a · · Score: 5, Informative
    ... It was proprietary software, patents wouldn't have done a thing to it.
    Actually, a crucial part of Unix was patented, before software patents were technically allowed. But the fact that it had been was the main reason that Unix spread so rapidly in the 70s and 80s.

    Back in the 70s, Bell Labs was required by an antitrust consent decree of January 1956 to reveal what patents it had applied for, supply information about them to competitors, and license them in anticipation of issuance to anyone for nominal fees. Any source code covered by such a Bell Labs patent also had to be licensed for a nominal fee. So about every computer science department on the planet was able to obtain the Unix source.

    The patent in question was for the setuid bit, U.S. No. 4,135,240. If you look at it, you will see that it is apparently a hardware patent! This is the kicker paragraph:

    ... So far this Detailed Description has described the file access control information associated with each stored file, and the function of each piece of information in regulating access to the associated file. It remains now to complete this Detailed Description by illustrating an implementation giving concrete form to this functional description. To those skilled in the computer art it is obvious that such an implementation can be expressed either in terms of a computer program (software) implementation or a computer circuitry (hardware) implementation, the two being functional equivalents of one another. It will be understood that a functionally equivalent software embodiment is within the scope of the inventive contribution herein described. For some purposes a software embodiment may likely be preferrable in practice.
    Technically, even though that said it "will be understood," and was understood by everyone as a software patent, it wasn't until the 1981 Supreme case of Diamond v. Diehr that it became enforcable as such. Perhaps that is why the patent took six years to issue back in the 70s.

    So, through the 1970s, Unix spread because it was covered by an unenforcable software patent! Doug McIlroy said, "AT&T distributed Unix with the understanding that a license fee would be collected if and when the setuid patent issued. When the event finally occurred, the logistical problems of retroactively collecting small fees from hundreds of licensees did not seem worth the effort, so the patent was placed in the public domain."

  34. C++ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But Bjarne Stroustrup, who came to the Labs later and designed C++, a further improved version of C...

    Uh...really? Must be those multiple plus signs...

  35. Re:Boring fluff piece by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well you have to account for the audience that The Economist is addressed to. Although there is a large techie population that reads The Economist, there are a lot of World Leaders and i-banker types. Do you really think Dubya knows where C and Unix originated from?

  36. Historical errors in article by Tore+S+B · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article makes a few mistakes. First of all, Unix was far from the first OS to be written in a high-level language. Multics was the first big OS (PL/1!! Shudder!), and there were many research OS'en at the time.

    Also, the PDP-7 did NOT have a hard drive. Believe me, I have one. The PDP-7 did, however, have an optional model 24 Serial Drum (something like a low-capacity fixed-head hard drive, around 100KB IIRC), whose capacity I cannot recall, a 555 Dual DECTape unit, a directly addressable very-low-density even by its time magnetic tape system, and, of course, the 10 cps paper tape punch/ 300cps High-Speed Optical paper tape reader. But there was never a moving head hard drive. The PDP-8 had one, but I can't for the life of me remember the name.

    The PDP-7 was an 18-bit, 15-bit adressed system.

    --
    toresbe
    1. Re:Historical errors in article by Detritus · · Score: 1

      I think there was a version of the RK05 for the PDP-8. There was also a fixed head disk, the RF08.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    2. Re:Historical errors in article by Tore+S+B · · Score: 1

      That's right. The controller was the RX8E or something. Thanks :)

      --
      toresbe
    3. Re:Historical errors in article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      "OS'en"

      You should be shot for that.

    4. Re:Historical errors in article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not only that, Multics was also the inspiration for Unix - original name Unics.

      Bell Labs were part of the original Multics project, writing (IIRC) the compilers and other utilities, while MIT wrote the OS and GE providede the hardware (the original machine was a 645, a modified version of the 635)

      The history of Multics - and much more - can be found at www.multicians.org

  37. Headache generator by zyche · · Score: 1

    I hope your computer renovating skills are better than your photography skills... :-/

    Almost every photo is unfocused.

    1. Re:Headache generator by Tore+S+B · · Score: 1

      The camera did it - No, really. :)
      It's a very crappy camera. I didn't see that it was out of focus on the tiny LCD, and thus didn't retake them. It's SUPPOSED to do all that stuff automatically, but, well, you said it.

      --
      toresbe
  38. Re: Patents? Oh-the-irony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Anyone catches the irony in the fact that Thompson & Ritchie ported Unix to the PDP-11 so that the Patent Guys at AT&T could get a word processor?

    These patent laywers can't even recognize the birth of a major technical breakthru even if it's placed in front of them. *grin*

    Why didn't it occur to them to ask: -Is there something here, that we ought to patent? How about those pipe-thingies? Or the notion that everything is just a file? Or ''the use of an intermediate language to port a computer operating systems between incompatible hardware systems''

    No? Oh-well... Thank you for the ignorance.

  39. Liar! by close_wait · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    Dennis Richie is a liar! Everyone knows that it was me who actually wrote UNIX.

    Darl.

    1. Re:Liar! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Dennis Richie is a liar! Everyone knows that it
      > was me who actually wrote UNIX.
      >
      > Darl.

      Really? All these Linux types keep telling me it
      was Linus who invented Unix.

  40. No way! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You are not a very good troll.

  41. The moral of the story is... by peterpi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Managers: If you have a couple of coders with nothing to do for a month or two, don't panic. Tell them to do what the hell they want and they'll come up with something useful.

    1. Re:The moral of the story is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hardly. It takes an extremely motivated individual to do something like that. Most people just arn't that way, and if they were then it wouldn't matter if they were given time to "do whatever they want", they would get useful things done anyway.

      Most people would just waste the entire free time they were given, screwing around with this and that (like posting on Slashdot).

    2. Re:The moral of the story is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It looks like Google has learnt from Bell Labs - they give their engineers time to do whatever they like, and come up with some pretty neat creations (GFS, GMail, ...). Maybe one day they'll come up with something non-Googley that we can all integrate into our computing environments. :)

    3. Re:The moral of the story is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Managers: If you have a couple of coders with nothing to do for a month or two, don't panic. Tell them to do what the hell they want and they'll come up with something useful.

      I fear for the manager who doesn't know which half of that statement is false.
  42. C is great by kumarankit · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    C has really done wonders...all other languages are no where around it.. --ankit kumar

    1. Re:C is great by kaligraphic · · Score: 1

      Even Microsoft had to turn to C to finish spelling out Visual BasiC

      --
      You are standing in an open server west of a blue house, with a boarded front door. There is an Exchange mailbox here.
    2. Re:C is great by kumarankit · · Score: 1

      C has the power to C(see) :)

  43. Say what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
    But Bjarne Stroustrup, who came to the Labs later and designed C++, a further improved version of C, disagrees.
    C++ is a further improved version of C? Excuse me whilst I double over with laughter. I understand OO very well; but OO as implemented in C++ just makes me want to gag. Objective C is an example of a good way to add OO to C. C++ is not.

    I would definitely prefer programming in Java over programming in C++. Actually, come to think of it, I'd prefer programming in Visual Basic (*hack* *cough*) over programming in C++.

    1. Re:Say what? by tarunthegreat2 · · Score: 1

      Seriously, I've worked with C, VB, C#, Java, C++, and there really was nothing worse than C++. At least VB and C# come with a kickass dev environment. C++ was awful even in that kickass dev env.

      --
      My Favourite Meme
    2. Re:Say what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree. I have been programming since 1968 and it is my professional opinion that C++ is by far the worst language I have encountered.

      The only reason I can see for it's popularity is that Microsoft has taken over the schools.

    3. Re:Say what? by TwistedSquare · · Score: 1

      Care to say why? I see some anti-C++ posts here, but no-one actually seems to be bothering with reasons, evidence etc.

    4. Re:Say what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A couple of items you might want to read are C.A.R Hoares Turing award lecture (sorry, I cannot provide a link) and http://www.leshatton.org/IEEE_Soft_98a.html

      Hoare's article, while primarily about ADA, talks of the problems with a complex language. And Hatton's article (pdf link at the top right of the page) gives empiracle evidence. While researching this subject I was horrified to learn that almost no empiracle data existed. What I could find was mostly platitudes about how much "better" C++ and OOP was without giving any real data.

      What I have found in my experience is that OO (especially as implemented by C++) requires that one have complete knowledge of everything in order to understand any line of code. Overloading of operators is a horrible idea. One cannot read the code without reading ALL of the code and taking notes.

      The most troublesome bugs I have chased in my career have been in C++. I find it easier to fix a 100,000 line shop worn COBOL (I have never professionally programmed in COBOL, only chased bugs) program than to find the bug in a 10,000 line C++ (I program in C++ regularly) program.

      Also notice what languages the bloated software everyone complains about is written. I have learned to avoid applications written in C++ as I have found them to be larger, slower, and less reliable than applications written in other languages.

  44. what a crock by bl8n8r · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Everyone knows SCO invented Unix. Don't you people read the friggin news?

    --
    boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
  45. [OT] Your sig by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's very interesting. Speaking as a non-American, that's very close to the order I would have listed them in according to the quality of their foreign policies.

    1. Re:[OT] Your sig by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Playing with numbers is fun, but it helps if you actually understand what they mean.

  46. Don't encourage the criminal Monopoly.... by tiger99 · · Score: 1
    Don't give Sir Bill ideas.....

    After all, most of the software patents that seem to be granted are for things where there has been lots of prior art, this would be no exception if it was submitted to the overworked USPTO.

  47. Oh, yes they would.... by tiger99 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    We would all still be programming with a panel of lights and toggle switches, as was common up till about the era of the PDP-11. I remember once keying in a bootstrap loader that way, fortunately it was only a very short one, designed to load a longer one from a punched tape.

    Software patents would have killed progress than, as they are doing now.

    1. Re:Oh, yes they would.... by miu · · Score: 1
      Well yeah that is what I meant. We would have a ui available, but programming and use of computers would have remained a black art and growth would have been much slower than what was experienced. Computing power and availability only started its exponential rate of increase once computers could be used by normal human beings and programs useful to such people could be built. Prior to the command line computers where little more than very clumsy calculators.

      I was pointing out to the original poster that patents on command line interfaces would have set computing back at least 15 years from where we are today and that his glib "they would have come up with something else" is ignorant rubbish.

      --

      [Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
    2. Re:Oh, yes they would.... by tiger99 · · Score: 1
      Yes indeed. It doesn't bear thinking about. What we have now is still far from perfection (and not necessarily improving, if Windoze XP in its default configuration is anything to go by, the words "garish" and "childish" are the first that come to mind), but at least reasonably useable for most people without too much training.

      I somehow think that the best that would have been possible is knobs and sliders, like any other bit of equipment (which surfaces in wheel mice and so on, to an extent), but I don't know how a word processor would be possible without a keyboard. OK, voice input, but that needed many years to get working and is still an immature and slightly erratic technology, and without a solid base of computers to drive the push for performance, Moore's Law would not work so we would not have the performance to do the voice recognition. A truly vicious circle.

      As an aside I was asked to look at the possibility of doing some software safety assessment on a fancy X-ray machine used for brain problems, maybe 10 years ago. The primary operator input (there also would have been a keyboard and mouse etc) was a panel of rotary knobs (can't remember exactly how many, maybe 8 or 16) which IIRC was a standard Sun peripheral at the time, because that suited exactly how they wanted to control the thing. I guess brain surgeons know best, certainly a jittery Monopoly Mouse would not have been a good idea for precise control.

    3. Re:Oh, yes they would.... by miu · · Score: 1
      I'm convinced that before we see any great improvements in interfaces we need a set of improved input devices. I imagine something along the lines of a programmable virtual keyboard and pointer as a first step.

      The drive seems to be toward false simplicity in Windows and that MS will likely miss out on early advances in new types of input devices because of this. I think many ui designers underestimate how much learning people are willing to do about an environment if they see a real benefit to it. An entire generation of word processor users learned interfaces that would give emacs a run for its money wrt complexity, and in the online games I've played I see users who would never "program" learning to use macroing and shortcut systems that are somewhat complicated.

      --

      [Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
    4. Re:Oh, yes they would.... by tiger99 · · Score: 1
      Yes, I remember Multimate, and as it was latterly being run in a DOS box under Billdoze 3.1, I managed to change the icon to Multihate! Before that was Worststar..... (One imbecilic manager with severeeparanoid megalomaniac tendencies (no, I have never worked for Microsoft!) insisted that we use it as a programming editor. Ouch! And, likening them to EMACS is a pretty fair comparison! Maybe I should not say too much about Edlin, in case someone, somewhere actually liked it. The sad thing is that, like all Monopoly products, better, less bloated things were available, even then. The text editor on any basic Z80 or 6502 based computer of the preceding several years was way ahead.

      You are of course right, some people will learn about their environment if there is some reason to do so, but most Windoze packages are the ultimate form of dumbing-down, because while they work, they avoid the need for people to think. Some MAC users are even worse, I know graphics artists who know less than nothing about their computers, not even being able to name the software packages they are using, they only know it as a MAC. One even considers himself a computer expert. Now this is no place to start the MAC vs PC debate, because many PC users are quite similar, and in any case this is not the fault of the particular computer architecture. I am sure I would be very happy with a MAC, as long as it ran OS-X of course.

      There does need to be a major breakthrough in input devices or methods, keep thinking about it! We shall expect to read all about your invention on Slashdot one day. Just remember that individual people like you and I turn out far more inventions than mighty corporations, including the Monopoly, so you have at least as much chance as anyone, because you have already thought about it. And good luck.

  48. Pascal must by StrawberryFrog · · Score: 1
    uh, shouldn't that be
    for i := 0 to Length(str1) - 1 do
    begin
    if str1[i] in ['a'..'z'] then
    str2[i] := chr(ord(str1[i]) + 32)
    else
    str2[i] := str1[i];
    end;
    There are problems in your code:

    • Using while not for - odd, but not fatal
    • On the
      chr(ord
      line you open two '(' brackets and close three of them. Compile error.
    • The else case is copying str2 into str1, potentially out of range on str2. Runtime error if you have range checking on.

    --

    My Karma: ran over your Dogma
    StrawberryFrog

    1. Re:Pascal must by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are problems in your code

      Are you doubting God's words?

  49. How ironic .... by noman666 · · Score: 1

    ... that the techno-garbled photo of him is full of Visual Basic code.

    1. Re:How ironic .... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's actually FilePro, not VB.

  50. Better links for Dennis Ritchie by ishmalius · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I often give Prof. Ritchie's home page to newbs and students, and especially his excellent self-history of the development of the C language.

    It should be noted by detractors of C, that Mr. Ritchie himself does not think that his brainchild is perfect. This discussion contains a "Critique" section where he analyzes the strengths and failures of the language. At the end, he summarizes the language thusly: "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."

    ...to which I certainly agree. It is fraught with numerous failings, yet C gets the job done, and carpets the computer world.

    1. Re:Better links for Dennis Ritchie by Tony-A · · Score: 1

      One thing I had never realized before. C was a transition from existing stuff on a WORD addressed machine to a BYTE addressed machine. When everything is cramped, it helps immensely if you can keep all the magic numbers exactly the same. The C mechanism for what looks like strings and arrays is a brilliant hack to address thingees by their number with no additional supporting machinery. A C pointer is "typed" to the extent of having a width so that pointer p + 1 points to the next such thing. As a side effect, 2[array] is precisely as meaningful as array[2].

      It's possible, even easy, to do things better than C. I don't think it's possible to do better without assuming something that C does not assume. If you do not have that stuff you have to assume, the "better" way is much worse.

  51. Re: 4 wheels forever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes! Dammit! I'm sick of cars too. Always the same old copy. Wheels, a couple of doors, some seats, some sort of steering mechanism.

    Screw that. Can't someone come up with something original? Who designed the wheel anyway? It's stupid, make something original you stupid copycats!

  52. Founding Fathers? by LabRat007 · · Score: 2, Funny

    How can they be Fathers if they're Unics?

    --
    "Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
  53. RMS is going to blow a gasket by robo45h · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The article mentions Linux briefly, and basically lays the entire GNU project at Linus Torvalds feet. There's no mention of RMS or the GNU project, who basically wrote all of the stuff above the kernel but just never got around to writing the kernel itself. Quite a bit of an oversight and over-simplification.
    To an extent, this rivalry was stripped of relevance by an unexpected entrant. In 1991, an obscure university student in Finland, Linus Torvalds, announced a project to write a new, open-source clone of Unix from scratch--what has come to be known as Linux.
  54. (eq? 'C 'Lisp?) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ironically, the graphic design montage accompanying the Economist article shows a photo of Ritchie with the now-obligatory transparent source-code overlay... in Lisp! ;-)

  55. C++ : Baaaaad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Interesting... have you tried Objective-C? Any comparison?

    1. Re:C++ : Baaaaad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I am not a big fan of OO. It appears to be one of those fads that promise much and deliver little.

      read
      http://www.leshatton.org/IEEE_Soft_98a.htm l

  56. Dave Cutler designed the NT kernel, plus VMS... by emil · · Score: 1

    For those not in the know, Dave Cutler was originally a DEC employee. He was first behind the PDP-11 OS named RSX-11, then became the lead for the VMS operating system on the VAX.

    Cutler was working on an i386 port of VMS that DEC decided to drop, so in 1988 he joined Microsoft and was the lead designer behind the NT kernel.

    He is now supposedly working on the AMD64 port.

    Dave Cutler Info
  57. Oh, please! by rd_syringe · · Score: 1, Informative

    I can tell you weren't around them to even miss the "old-time mentality of things." UNIX was a commercial product that spawned lawsuit hell.

    Personally, I believe UNIX is overhyped. People are attaching some sort of bizarre nostalgia and perfection to it. I saw one post here comparing pipes to "object orientation" before the idea had even been put forth.

  58. Patents expire by EdmundSS · · Score: 1

    If a patent had been granted on the Command Line paradigm, it would have expired by now. Computing history would look rather different, but we'd be free of toggles & blinken lights.

    1. Re:Patents expire by tiger99 · · Score: 1
      Quite so, but who wants a 20 year development cycle (or whatever the life of a patent is these days)? I guess the command line would have been unimpeded around 1990, so we would be expecting Windoze 1 about now, at a very rough guess.

      Still, it is fascinating to debate what might have been, in so doing we might identify the good idea that was missed, and patent it...... (or preferably put it under GPL!)

  59. OPENDOC!!!!111 by solios · · Score: 1

    Modern Application Development did take a stab at this, back during the MacOS 8-8.1 days. OpenDoc was very short-lived, and was basically exactly what you describe: the UNIX model of a score of little single-purpose thingers that could be strung together however the user wanted.

    Add spellchecking to your webbrowser, html support to your text editor, vector tools to a page layout program, or jam together a whole bunch of modules and have something like pagemaker or dreamweaver with just the features you want. Upgrade components, not the whole application....

    Of course, Adobe and Macromedia dropped a giant load in their pants and did what they always do whenever Apple does anything interesting- threaten to drop support for the platform.

    So, OpenDoc was gone in OS 8.5. It got Steved. :-|

  60. Mod Parent Up by wan-fu · · Score: 1

    Despite most people's, including my own, annoyance at RMS constantly tooting the GNU horn, there is simply no doubt that Linux would not be where it is today with gcc from RMS and the rest of the tools from the GNU project.

  61. Sematic flame for our friends at the Economist by Xenophon+Fenderson, · · Score: 1
    Dennis Ritchie, who has worked at the Labs since 1967, was central to both projects. He is revered as the inventor of C, and, with Ken Thompson, as the co-inventor of Unix.

    Why do people use "invent" when they really mean "write"?

    --
    I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
  62. Origins by certsoft · · Score: 2, Funny
    The origins of C and Pascal:
    • Pascal - A University in Zuerich
    • C - A phone company in New Jersey

    Laugh, it's funny.

  63. Yes, well... Re:Say what? by hacksoncode · · Score: 1
    Rest assured that if ObjectiveC were ever to gain actual widespread acceptance, it too would become a crufty pile of shit.

    That's inherent in the job that low-level programming languages such as C/C++ are intended to be used for.

  64. Today's Super-UNIX by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Remarkably, Lucent gives away for free a post-modern operating system which is the successor to UNIX and which was designed by many of the same geniuses who developed UNIX. The new system is a free download from the Lucent server at http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/.

  65. Obscure? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why is in the article Bill Joy seen as "a graduate student" while Linus Torvalds is "an obscure university student in Finland"?

  66. Sure he has by commodoresloat · · Score: 1

    "C" was just an abbreviation.

  67. Obligatory Quine reference by Bush+Pig · · Score: 1

    In that case, your sig _should_ read:

    'Any posts with references to "1984" will be ignored.'

    --
    What a long, strange trip it's been.
  68. Some names that should have been mentioned by stox · · Score: 1

    Joe Ossanna
    Lee McMahon
    Mike Lesk
    Al Aho
    Lorinda Cherry
    Peter Weinberger

    And I am sure there are many more who should not be forgotten for sowing the seeds of the fruit we enjoy today.

    --
    "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "