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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 'Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service).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.'"
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.
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.
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+
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.