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 'Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service).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

Comments

Worth thinking about

[Mannerism]

Not a bad retrospective, and interesting in that it illustrates some of the reasons for Unix's success: availability of source, and the ability for the user to create and replace tools easily. One wonders how those lessons might be applied not necessarily to operating systems or even computing, but to other industries and technical endeavours.

Re:Worth thinking about

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Not a bad retrospective, and interesting in that it illustrates some of the reasons for Unix's success: availability of source, and the ability for the user to create and replace tools easily.

Exactly. Unix has survived for as long as it has because it was built from, encouraged and profited from a culture of free innovation. Indeed, moreso that its actual code, I would argue that it is this culture that constitutes exactly what is meant by Unix.

Unix is not just an OS. It is a culture. Indeed, there is really no one "Unix" operating system. Or at least, no one widely used one called "Unix". Linux, BSD, OSX, BeOS, all can be called *nix systems. But what unifies them is not their internal mechanisms or algorithms or standards. What links them is the culture of the people who use them, and who build them. The idea of freely sharing tools, building on the work of others, understanding the whole of the machine, making magic happen with code; that is what Unix really is. You just don't see this kind of thinking in groups using other operating systems.

It's no surprise that the GPL and open source in general were born from the minds of Unix hackers. In many ways, the GPL only formalises the culture of academic openness, innovation and free sharing of ideas that existed throughout the Unix timeline. It's true that Unix was regarded by Big Corps as a money making excercise, but that's not how hackers saw it. They saw Unix and the programs that ran on it as part of their culture, and more importantly, heritage.

Unix has become more than source code or a framework. Is a significant part of our society. The norms and customs of Unix hackers have become their own tradition and even law in places. Unix and the hacker culture are a way our society has found to cope with the recent addition of computers, a way that has served well as the they and the internet become more and more pervasive. Like the old traditions and customs that founded our legal and civil systems, the Unix culture has formed the foundation of how we deal with the integration of computers into our lives.

The culture, traditions and ethics of Unix will probably outlast the lines of source that make up the programs, or the architectures they ran on. I expect Unix and hacker culture, or their descendants, will still be around in another 40 or 400 years, forming the philosophical foundation of a digital age.

This makes Unix 15 years older than Tetris

[tepples]

Unix just turned 40, and Tetris just turned 25. What do they have in common other than closely spaced birthdays? They were both first developed on PDP-11 hardware (Unix on a PDP-11, Tetris on a Russian clone). And they've both been cloned, early and often.

U.S. copyright explicitly doesn't apply to methods of operation. Title 17, United States Code, section 102(b). This makes it legal to "clone" a computer program by observing its method of operation. But SCO has tried to use copyright to shut down Unix clones, and The Tetris Company has tried to use copyright to shut down Tetris clones. SCO already lost its case (there is no copyrightable piece of Unix in Linux), but the other case (Tetris v. BioSocia) is still pending.

And despite Tetris inventor Alexey Pajitnov's expressed disdain for free software, two servers operated by Tetris (zone.tetris.com and www.tetrisfriends.com) are run using GNU/Linux.

Re:And to celebrate, it issued the command:

[Orp]

Bah. Your command would fail. You need to escape the splat just like the semicolon:

find my_lawn -name kids\* -exec rm -f {} \;

However -exec is slow. Try:

find my_lawn -name kids\* | xargs rm -rvf

Verbose for your kid-removing satisfaction.

Oh, and happy birthday, UNIX! Without you my career would have undoubtedly been less interesting.

40 and still relevant

[krisbrowne42]

Wow... 40 already.

When I started doing Unix Admin professionally Unix was just turning 30, Linux was poised to take over the Desktop, Mac OS X was just a glimmer of hope, and Sun was the king of commercial Unix.

When I started using Minix, Unix was only 20, but RMS was kvetching about source code (and Hurd was Coming Soon), BSD had just won it's freedom, and Steve Jobs was doing cool things over at NeXT. Unix was just leaving it's First "Golden Age"...

Now, at 40, Mac OS X is the most used Unix system, Sun was just bought cheap, most other commercial Unix systems are defunct... But with Android, Pre, and iPhone all putting *nix systems in the palms of millions, Macs selling more than ever, and many companies offering Linux pre-installed in the box, Unix is as relevant as ever.

Re:Unix is over the hill

[BrokenHalo]

Windows could take on board one thing from From Unix and be a much better product as a result: as David Korn (of ksh fame) says in TFA: "One of the hallmarks of Unix was that tools could be written, and better tools could replace them... It wasn't some monolith where you had to buy into everything; you could actually develop better versions.". Microsoft has a lot to learn. The progress from 1980's DOS to today's offering is pretty sad.

Windows has more and more Unix features

[stoffer_k]

Did you notice that since Windows 3 Microsoft keeps adding Unix-like features? Windows 3 did not have _real_ multitasking, it came with WinNT. Windows NT was also a multi-user system, another Unix-like feature. With Windows Vista came the Windows power shell, M$ equivalent of Unix shell. In fact, Unix is an ideal, which Microsoft is approaching in each new Windows release.

Re:Unix is over the hill

[rolfwind]

Windows could take on board one thing from From Unix and be a much better product as a result: as David Korn (of ksh fame) says in TFA: "One of the hallmarks of Unix was that tools could be written, and better tools could replace them... It wasn't some monolith where you had to buy into everything; you could actually develop better versions.". Microsoft has a lot to learn. The progress from 1980's DOS to today's offering is pretty sad.

Does Unix philosophy actually mesh with Unix reality? A reason I ask is because in unix everything is supposedly a file, but there were enough exceptions, such as in networking, that in the seperate Plan9 OS, they sought to really make everything a file. And that by the original makers of unix.