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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 'Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service).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.'"
Depends on which unix variant you were using, on sco unixware 2.0, you would have to quote and escape or you would get all kinds of screwed up output.
find my_lawn -name kids\* | xargs rm -rvf
That'll fail to get a kid named "Joe Lawnmower" off your lawn, but will wipe out all lawnmowers and shoot all people named "Joe", including your grandfather.
Is that so ? Then why does Mac OS, for example, take a step back when it want to suddenly comply with UNIX ? The philosophy may be there, but the institution's grip is still firm. This is no slap on Mac OS, mind you - anyone and everyone can be silly enough to take -n out of echo for the simple sake of complying with a piece of paper instead of going with the times.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Informative? WTF? The moderators are once again smoking crack...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Actually SCO argued that UNIX-clones weren't clones at all, but were using the same C code. Sure, they were full of shit, but what they were claiming IBM had done actually would have been a violation of copyright law.
The Finder is just another app.
Don't like it? Replace it with Front Row or something else.
Don't like your shell's interpretation of a POSIX command? Replace it with something else - 'printf' comes to mind.
There's no Apple-imposed barrier. POSIX -ne UNIX, and POSIX owes much of its shell syntax requirement to ksh interpretation (not pdksh, not tcsh, not bash, and not zsh).
because in the end it was easier to make Unix user friendly than it was to to fix Windows :)
An old joke but it had to be said.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
One wonders how those lessons might be applied not necessarily to operating systems or even computing, but to other industries and technical endeavours.
People forget that is the entire concept behind patents. To further progress by showing others how things work, not by wrapping things up in secrecy. The concept is thus:
1) You invent something. You can keep it a secret but if some one invents the same thing you have no recourse. You can't say they stole it from you. There is no such thing as a "trade secret" which is enforceable. In order to prove it you have to reveal it making it no longer a secret.
2) Or you can patent it. For which you *do* get legal protection and a temporary monopoly. In exchange others get to review and study your design to improve upon it and to incorporate it into their products or designs. This furthers technology furthering the common good.
People forget that the original purpose of patents isn't profit. Isn't that strange?
The Unix/FOSS paradigm is also very much like that of scientific research. Where methods, data and results are published for the use of others to further their research.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I know you're just going for a +5, Funny, but:
ls = list
cp = copy
rm = remove
mv = move
Not so cryptic? They were deliberately intended to be short so that they were easy to remember and easy to type. Rather important details to an administrator like myself who might use them dozens or even hundreds of times each day.
On the other hand, Linux has been adding Windows-like features for the same period of time . . . like, say, GUIs, and drivers, and hardware acceleration, and programs that end-users want to use.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
You're the revisionist.
It didn't matter if the UNIX you were running on was licensed from Sun, HP, or Dec. You could write your program for the UNIX API and move from one to another. That's WHY they failed, they were trying to establish proprietary lock-in on a platform that had openness built into the bones. The only proprietary operating system that has any market penetration now is one that refused to become another implementation of the hippie OS... Windows NT.
Not AT&T, not DEC, not HP, not IBM, none of them could keep the hippie OS from shining through. Those of us who were working in hippie OS land in the '70s and early '80s kept telling the squares that they couldn't keep the cats in the bag, and we were right.
It doesn't suddenly want to comply with UNIX (actually it is a certified UNIX since 10.5), but OS X is just todays version of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP which used to be BSD running on top of a Mac kernel. So that made it UN*X in the first place, since 1986. Forget about Mac OS (sans X), that's a dead horse in many ways. What we are looking at now is NeXTSTEP with a different marketing name, which was better than Mac OS to begin with because SJ had the chance to avoid the stupid mistakes done with Mac OS, when he created NeXT
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
C'mon, you know you've thunk it when watching the less experienced and the preoccupied before. And if you're like most people, you've had the experience of wanting bash or ksh (or csh, so that the BSD guys feel loved) to be a DWIM shell (do-what-I-mean, as opposed to do-what-I-say).
And probably about one day and 5 minutes from the 40th anniversary of the first time two UNIX users discussed the finer points of quoting in shell commands. ;-)
Even in the late 60's teletypes would print the character you just typed in "real" time i.e. just after you pressed the key.
Which is the real reason why the most commonly used Unix commands are two characters, and the real reason why Unix command only print things when either A) requested, or B) when something surprising happens.
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