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Unix Turns 40
wandazulu writes "Forty years ago this summer, Ken Thompson sat down and wrote a small operating system that would eventually be called Unix. An article at ComputerWorld describes the history, present, and future of what could arguably be called the most important operating system of them all. 'Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service). They had no desire to stick with any of the batch operating systems that predominated at the time, nor did they want to reinvent Multics, which they saw as grotesque and unwieldy. After batting around some ideas for a new system, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix, which the pair would continue to develop over the next several years with the help of colleagues Doug McIlroy, Joe Ossanna and Rudd Canaday.'"
You are a giant douche bag
Yeah, but it is a terrible Unix system. How the hell it got certified is beyond me. I'd rather slit my wrists than ever use headless Darwin again.
I mean, it's fine as a desktop OS (grand actually, I'd recommend it to anyone). But Darwin is evil.
Microsoft told the Court that removing Explorer was impossible. They lied, but that's not the point. There's an attitude difference.
Well, explorer is pretty integrated into Windows, to be fair. Offering an operating system without a default web browser now-a-days is pretty sad... and explorer is your shell. But that's all technical details, I am sure they could create a gooned-up product to please the courts if they really wanted to.
Microsoft doesn't want you changing their OS. It's theirs, they are the only ones who get to decide what is good and what is bad.
Windows is just one system. Granted, it's a much more progressive and cohesive system, but it's just one example of a system. My main issue is not really Linux v. Windows. When you buy Windows, you're buying a professional product, not a hacked-up piece of inconsistent and undocumented crap. It's a different product with a different market.
In Unix the choice is given to the user. Change shells by simply typing the name of any of the half-dozen provided to you. If you don't like the ones that are there, write your own and distribute it.
And they all act like crappy 1980's terminals. It's so unbelievably amazing. It's just a bunch of implementations of the same sorry crap.
Forking is GOOD. When someone has a better idea in Unix, they release their better idea and people get to see it, to use it, to decide if it really is a better idea, and if it is, it will win out, and the old idea will be replaced. To do that in the Windows world, you have to hope Microsoft decides its a better idea and incorporates it for you. The eco-system is completely different.
And yet nothing ever seems to be accomplished. It's the same archaic system it was in the 80's built on the same concepts with the same interface and development tools. It's a freeze frame of decades-old computer science. I mean, people are still using X... it's just not going anywhere. Things could be so much better than this. It's like software Calvinism.
And if you think Unix prevents software from advancing, I'd like you to take a look at the World Wide Web, almost all of which was developed by that same open model you denounce. Not just TCP/IP and the web browser itself, but PHP, Ruby, all the new tools doing things that were never done before, come from those places you claim will never advance software.
What is Ruby doing that hasn't been done before? It's just doing what Java or Python did, but much much inferior in performance and resource usage. The open model is not the failure... UNIX is. A better open system could show up... and yet it doesn't. UNIX is an idealistic black hole. Its good-enough-ness cock-blocks any sort of progress or reimagination of computing. It is the lack of vision and creativity incarnate.
Sounds to me like you have your own reality distortion field.
Well hurr-duh-durr-durr-durr.