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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 'Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service).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.'"
Fresh like a pile of garbage heaped on top of an older, more rotten pile of garbage.
It's wonderful to see everyone parading around and celebrating the mastery of UNIX. I've seen mention of the fact that UNIX is better because its components can be replaced... and yet this isn't any different than Windows, which can have its explorer ripped out... and yet the morons chime on.
And for all this amazing progressive openness (which will solve everything someday), the Unix Hater's Handbook is still almost as completely applicable today as it was over a decade ago when it was written.
What does that say about progress? Basically, Linux is now doing the same thing UNIX has done historically, leverage enthusiasm from conservative admins to block all progress in system development. It is the ultimate curse of the "good enough" solution, demonstrating that the most important factor in the computing world is elitism. It's the cult of the inaccessible and unusable system. It is a blackhole of useless knowledge. It's a gaping wound in security, stability, and the progress of usability.
Indeed, UNIX is as bad as it ever has been... it's 2009 and people are pushing this hellish mess onto home users, now offering desktops like Ubuntu, swallowing resources, breaking at every turn, and all at once offering less lucidity and ease of use than 20 year old commercial solutions.
UNIX is the cancer that keeps computers "geeky" and keeps the power of computing out of the hands of regular users. UNIX is like the Church which dragged society out of the enlightenment of Rome and into the dark ages, filling peoples' heads with superstition and making progress a dark taboo. Now, thanks to the new popularity of linux, CS students are raised in unix-like environments, where dogmatic and archaic beliefs will prevent them from ever advancing software. They are trapped in streams of text and monoliths, doomed to repeat outdated principles of system design.
Here's to the new dark ages.
You have the analogy backwards. Corporations such as Microsoft are the church. Their modus operandi is to constrain their users into a narrow view of thinking while extracting as much in the way of resources as possible. Linux allows escape from that, much to the chagrin of Microsoft.
This is perhaps the weakest retort anyone has ever given me on slashdot.
You've completely forgotten that there is computing outside of Microsoft and Unix... and technologically, Microsoft has been far more progressive. Linux people are taking powerful energy-wasting modern desktop hardware and running them like 1970's dumb terminals. It's pathetic and regressive. The greatest contribution of the open source community to the modern computing world is to fill the web up with so many reports and messages in forums and mailing lists of buggy, undocumented, and misbehaving software that the open source ecosystem is beginning to rival porn as the biggest wad of useless data on the web.
The masturbatory self-congratulation of the open source community alone has turned the entire web into something between an AA meeting and a fetish club for computing sadists.
Careful there - that's a meme the MS shills are trying to establish ahead of the EU ruling, and I am sure you wouldn't want to consciously repeat that. In the first place, the vast majority of consumers receive an OS when they buy the computer, so whoever sells the computer will be happy to install a browser, or several browsers, or the browser of the user's choice. Computers sold to businesses often have tech support who should be able to install a browser without too much difficulty (meaning none at all). For any case not just covered, a friend with a browser downloaded onto a thumb drive will do the trick nicely. Absolutely no need at all for the OS to come with a browser.
It's absolutely true, though. The primary purpose of your computer now-a-days is to access the web. When you're offering a platform, you're also offering a supported web experience. It's an interesting question whether it's the same sort of thing today to offer a system without a supported browser.
By all means, there's no reason they can't offer multiple browsers, though. It's simply important that there's a supported browser available. It shouldn't be any problem to do what OS X did (I forget whether it was Jaguar or Panther) and simply bundle two browsers.
Now, even Apple ships Mac OS X with only Safari. The web browser is the face and flagship for the platform. No amount of hatred of Microsoft will change that. It's going to be tricky for them to define their platform while stepping around these rulings.
Who says? I say the OS is irrelevant today. You should be able to tun the web experience of your choice on it. If we are speaking specifically about Windows here, we definitely don't want their "web experience" integrated. Microsoft holds a monopoly on the desk top. We certainly don't want them extending this to the web. The danger of monoculture is another thing to avoid.
Okay. That's not what you want. Microsoft really can't take the position of ruining itself, though- that is, ceding the most important spot on the desktop, the browser. They will fight for the right to offer a browser on their desktop to remain relevant on the web.
I would hardly say things are moving towards a monoculture... all the third party browsers are gaining marketshare.
This is why we are all so grateful to see the EU stepping in to level the playing field.
I agree. That is the appropriate position of government regulation. Corporations can't fail to be self-interested.