Stangely
by
Anonymous Coward
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· 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.
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
Re:Stangely
by
ModernGeek
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· 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.
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.
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.
*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.
I Just Hope...
by
zenmojodaddy
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· 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.
The sad loss of the terminal room
by
Paul+Crowley
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· 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:-)
Re:quick history leason
by
Anonymous Coward
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· 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.
Re:quick history leason
by
Anonymous Coward
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· 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.
Re:Modules
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Anonymous Coward
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· 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.
Pass that bong, dude
by
melted
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· 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.
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.
The moral of the story is...
by
peterpi
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· 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.
Re:On the fifth day...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· 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).
Say what?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· 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++.
To help answer your question (and it's a damn good one), I'd make two observations:
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.
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
Re:UNIX forever?
by
brunns
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· 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.
Re:UNIX forever?
by
pthisis
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· 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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
/. 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 :-)
Even
Xenu loves you!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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++.
To help answer your question (and it's a damn good one), I'd make two observations:
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
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.
It was a word processor. I am certain they could find other uses for a word processor than a patent office.
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.
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?
/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.
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.
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