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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 'Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service).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.'"
Yesss. (Expecting +5 Informative!)
Ezekiel 23:20
For those who haven't read it, this book is a GREAT read: A quarter Century of Unix by Peter H Salus Highly recommended, and once you've read it you'll suddenly understand why a lot of stuff is the way it is. Hat's off to the Best. Operating System. Ever.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Ritchie invented C, it's funny that Ken worked on B with some help from Ritchie, C was the successor to B
I can't help but point out the obvious here, but Android is based upon linux.
I really, really want to say that Ken and Dennis invented C to make unix but I'm not completely sure. I could look it up, but I'm interested to hear what people have to say here. I mean, they're the K&R of the original C book, right?
No. The 'R' in "K&R" is indeed Dennis Ritchie, but the 'K' is Brian Kernighan.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
It's a load of horseshit, as Linus has repeatedly explained. Linux is not based on Minix. The architecture of the two kernels is completely dissimilar, and Linus has many times made his feelings known about what he thinks of microkernels.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Not exactly. RTFA. Unix was originally written in assembler on a PDP-7 in 1969. Thompson developed B, and some Unix development continued using B on the PDP-7. Ritchie developed a successor, C, finishing in 1972; in 1973 Thompson ported most of the Unix kernel to C on a PDP-11.
So C wasn't developed to "create" Unix; Unix was a precursor. C was indeed designed for implementing system software though.
Brian Kernighan -- the K of K&R got involved in C development later, and was indeed one of the two authors of the seminal K&R.
If you measure in terms of directly by consumers, yes. Also by number of machines, yes. OS X is the #1 selling Unix machine by number of units. By revenue, no.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What do you think it means? OS X is certified (by the Open Group) UNIX, and it owns 8% of the desktop market. That's a lot of UNIX machines. Yes, other UNIX OSes dominate on the server (where OS X has no foothold at all), but I doubt there are as many server machines as there are client machines in general.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
To the person who actually modded this ^^^ +1 Informative: This was an extremely feeble attempt at +5 Funny. But thanks for reminding me that I am on Slashdot where mods can be fooled into anything. (*I know, I will go to hell for this...*)
Ezekiel 23:20
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.'
I cannot believe Ken Thompson wrote this nonsense.
B was derived from BCPL, which was a simplified version of the CPL language, designed at Cambridge and London Universities in the mid-60s. It was too complex to implement at that time, hence BCPL (Basic CPL).
B was very much like BCPL except that it used { } to define blocks, instead of (* and *).
AND, the original article (and the one above) promulgate the canard that Multics was unsuccessful and unwieldy.
In terms of influence on other OS's Multics was probably THE most important OS in history.
And an absolute joy to work with. Hence the original intention of Unics (the original spelling) to be cryptic and confusing - the exact OPPOSITE of Multics.
RMS had never even used UNIX when he started the GNU project: he was an ITS & Lisp hacker.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
sorry, you're the one living in fantasy land. The AT&T kind was mediocre, so Ken Thomspon and other hippies jazzed up the code (which was given to schools by at&t) with many improvements (32 bits, virtual memory, better tcpip) to make BSD. Later it was found in lawsuit against UCB that AT&T had incorporated (stolen) many BSD features into Unix. that was the hippie stuff, that made Unix good. So the BSD damn hippies wrote replacements for the AT&T things
As described in Dennis Ritchie's The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System.
you had me at #!
GNU's not Unix, you insensitive clod!
That is unsurprising, given that *nix is generally held to be the best OS family for most tasks, with there only being doubt about mainframes and desktops (and in desktops, the advantages of Windows are mostly non-technical, or relate to third-party software). Plan 9 was supposed to be Unix done right, with the benefit of hindsight and experience of the mistakes made. As we are talking about ways to improve OSes, in particular Unix, we will naturally mention many idea related to Plan 9.