Re:I sure am glad times have changed
by
mrchaotica
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· 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
Alternate Perspective
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
"A junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s" -- Dave Cutler
Re:Stangely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· 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.
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".
Re:Stangely
by
alangmead
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· 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.
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.
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*
Re:Stangely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Informative
setuid has a patent . Assigned to public domain I believe.
Re:On the fifth day...
by
fuzzix
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· 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!
Re:Stangely
by
black+mariah
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· 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'.
Unix WAS patented, which is WHY it spread
by
js7a
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· 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."
Re:Stangely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· 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.
Re:Does anyone know..
by
MnO-BF
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· Score: 3, Informative
Historical errors in article
by
Tore+S+B
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· 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.
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
Oh, please!
by
rd_syringe
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· 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.
Re:The funny thing is
by
Rysc
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· 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.
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.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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
"A junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s"
-- Dave Cutler
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
setuid has a patent . Assigned to public domain I believe.
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!
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'.
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:
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."
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.
Looks like it has something to do with filePro. The code is from the library on this page: http://www.aljex.com/bkw/filepro/
Please post a link to the original when you copy it to your post.
http://www.neystadt.org/john/humor/The-C-Bible.htm
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
Object-oriented programming in Simula predates Unix by nearly a decade.
-- Curt
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.
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
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.
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.