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Saving Unix Heritage, One Kernel At a Time
coondoggie writes "In this, its 40th year of operating system life, some Unix stalwarts are trying to resurrect its past. That is, they are taking on the unenviable and difficult job of restoring to their former glory old Unix software artifacts such as early Unix kernels, compilers and other important historical source code pieces.
In a paper to be presented at next week's Usenix show, Warren Toomey of the Bond School of IT is expected to detail restoration work being done on four key Unix software artifacts all from the early 1970s — Nsys, 1st edition Unix kernel, 1st and 2nd edition binaries and early C compilers.
In his paper, Toomey states that while the history of Unix has been well-documented, there was a time when the actual artifacts of early Unix development were in danger of being lost forever."
Is there really any useful purpose to be served by dredging this up? Don't these guys have anything better to do?
In a paper to be presented at next week's Usenix show, Warren Toomey of the Bond School of IT is expected to detail restoration work being done on four key Unix software artifacts all from the early 1970s
Afterwards atendees will be ushered to the dining hall for a fine serving of raisins, prune juice, and Oxygen treatments.
St. John's ambulance will also be on site to assist with attendees suffering with various age related ailments such as broken hips and arthritis.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
Not to diminish Unix's importance, it is a link in the chain -- but what a link it is! When MS is bankrupt, Windoze won't fit onto a DVD and no affordable hardware will be able to run it, Unix will be here. I run FreeBSD on my desktop and still enjoy firing up my AT&T 6300+ and playing with SVR2. Amazingly, the two computers, separated by more than 20 years, interact very nicely through a RS232 connection.
Despite what many a slashdot crowd might think, UNIX isn't exactly an elixir from the Gods. UNIX, Microsoft Windows and Intel x86 are living proofs that the best / most innovative technology doesn't necessarily have to win. Check Out: http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html.
I thought Unix has lots of so called "flavors" so which one are they talking about?
In fact, the little piece I link to has this introduction:
Unix is not a single operating system. It has many flavors (aka. variants, types, or implementations). Although based on a core set of Unix commands, different flavors have their own unique commands and features, and designed to work with different types of hardware. No one knows exactly how many Unix flavors are there, but it is safe to say that if including all those that are obscure and obsolete, the number of Unix flavors is at least in the hundreds. You can often tell that an operating system is in the Unix family if it has a name that is a combination of the letters U, I, and X.
So what exactly are these folks talking about?
Is there really any useful purpose to decoding Sumerian clay tablets, or analysing dockyard records from the 18th Century? One of the things that differentiates civilised human beings from all other living things on this planet is that we study history and preserve things from the past. Perhaps it just doesn't need justification, it is part of what we are.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
From TFA: "documentation is missing or incomplete, source code is missing leaving only the binary executables, or conversely the source exists but the compilation tools to reconstruct the executables are missing."
Sounds like any number of projects I've had the pleasure of working on over the years.
Those that don't learn UNIX are doomed to reinvent it. Poorly.
One may interpret that saying as someone trying to incite a Linux / BSD war. We lost good men from both sides the last time that happened...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
SIMH is a hardware emulator for a lot of the machines Unix ran on (PDP-8, PDP-11, etc.). They also have some original Unix versions along with some other software for the other hardware they support.
I have run Unix V5 on a SIMH-based PDP-11, and it worked well, though it was strange to realize how fast it was running, in emulation, on a machine 1/16 its original size (Mac laptop).
Very often the technically 'best' implementation doesn't win and I'd like to see those stories from inside Unix. For me, that's a more interesting angle than just version/feature stories.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
rogue, sail, wump, search (you have crashed into a planet), battlestar (in the closet is a kingly robe), mazewars, that mazewars-like curses game who's name escapes me, with a variety of weapons (satchel bomb... oooo...) that had destructable maze walls.
There are a variety of Rogue-like games out there that have been ported to current platforms, but the other ones, especially sail, search and mazewars, I haven't seen in years and years. These games were arguably part of our early Unix heritage because they enticed people to get a login and explore the OS, and for many of us (myself included) they were our motivation learn how to write termcaps for obscure terminals and emulators (the acid test was if Rogue would render correctly), learn programming to fix and enhance the games, and earn root access to do installs and fix permission issues.
Multi-user Unix games like sail and mazewars helped spread the Unix word because we were always trying to entice others to get a login so we could play with them. People with early PC experience couldn't even conceive of multi-user games.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Is there really any useful purpose to decoding Sumerian clay tablets, or analysing dockyard records from the 18th Century? One of the things that differentiates civilised human beings from all other living things on this planet is that we study history and preserve things from the past. Perhaps it just doesn't need justification, it is part of what we are.
Or to restoring old cars...
Bow-ties are cool.
If you must obsessively collect something, it might as well be bits. Every year or two, you can squeeze twice as much stuff into the same space. That makes it less likely that you'll be found trapped, filthy and emaciated, beneath a collapsed pile of your hoarded treasures.
This is the first time in human history that true exponential hoarding has become not only possible, but practical.
Is there really any useful purpose to be served by dredging this up? Don't these guys have anything better to do?
I say, "Why not?" It's interesting. That's enough.
Bow-ties are cool.
Too bad, being a /. troll and all, you keep needing to borrow them.
I'm glad this is getting some exposure. I know that Warren & co worked hard to get this ancient UNIX not only in a working state, but also he is the one responsible for pushing SCO with the oldSCO source license, and played a hand in getting Research UNIX 1-7 & 32v under a BSD style license, thus setting the foundation of UNIX free. Now SIMH may not be the 'friendliest' software out there for a new user to get used to, so I've done my part in making it a little more accessible. On the sourceforge project https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42 I've created Windows installable versions of the 4BSD stuff, 32v and UNIX v1. I do plan to add all the other research versions, along with a new build of RENO that doesn't need 1.8GB... Anyways try them out! the 4BSD stuff has TCP/IP along with a SLiRP hack it can connect to the internet immediately! IRC/Lynx/GCC work great on the Uwisc 4.3 BSD build. Ok that being said, there is a repository of SIMH binaries on https://sourceforge.net/projects/simh , and the MS-DOS build includes some small 'bootstrap' versions of various OS's including v1 UNIX on the PDP-11 simulator. The bar to trying this stuff is a lot lower then you may have guessed, and I'd encourage any fan of UNIX to really check it out.
Absolutely you can play these! And I'm not talking about 'ported' packages, and linux / BSD game stuff. I'm talking the actual 4BSD stuff. Check out SIMH, along with the TUHS archives, and you can run the real deal! I've setup some pointers on running this here: http://gunkies.org/wiki/4.0_BSD http://gunkies.org/wiki/4.2_BSD http://gunkies.org/wiki/4.3_BSD Of course curses didn't make it's appearence until 4.0BSD. And TCP/IP in 4.2.. 4.3BSD was without a doubt the best. And of course the guy who got it running has his pages, along with 'tape' images here: http://zazie.tom-yam.or.jp/starunix/ And of course for windows users there is the ready to run packages here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42
Someone will trot out a copy of the Morris worm and we can relive history all over again.
I was kind of thinking along the same lines. One of the problems with computers is that you CAN save every variation, every single edit of every file, everything, and it just seems to flow into a recursive save everything mindset that never ends and never saves enough.
Has anyone bothered saving the paper TTY output from the compiling (or worse -- line editing!) of these original UNIX items? What about that?
Ugh.
"... the actual artifacts of early Unix development were in danger of being lost forever."
That's odd. I seem to have had copies of Unix versions 1-5 on my computer for quite a while. And I'm not talking about UNIX system V SVR blah blah. I had some (there was a lot, it could have been all of it, but I didn't look too far into it) of the source code too.
This was at least a year or two back, when I was interested in the origins of UNIX, when I was simulating the PDP with SIMH. Complicated computers they were.
Also note that I don't have any real links to AT&T, Lucient Technologies, or Bell Labs. I do, however, have the internet and access to Google.
OK seriously, the above post is pretty screwed up in Firefox. I've got floating tab bars or something all over the post as well as throughout the thread and the tt font is coming out at 16 point or in some very large font.
These css screw ups have been happening a lot lately. Then again I am using the older (and better) comment system.
May the Maths Be with you!
Paper here: http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/toomey/toomey.pdf
Program here: http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/
Yes, I work for USENIX.
UNIX has evolved for a good reason. Only an academic would find this pursuit to be a reasonable use of time.
Being a /. troll and all, I doubt he has ever needed one, or ever will.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I wonder if you are fooled by lack of Desktop popularity of Linux since I see UNIX, by exact meaning along with certificates is approaching 10% desktop share now and basically sets the destination on mobile scene. That is OS X for you. Should Apple do the most interesting thing ever and gather Unix 03 certificate for a mobile device too?
If we look to matter as *NIX, MS is actually struggling to reach top spot spending billions of dollars to overtake Linux and FreeBSD _dominance_ on server scene. Enterprise? UNIX simply owns it. No matter their web 2.0 abuser army says or their sell off trojans in FOSS claims, UNIX runs the enterprise for 40 years and counting.
Being a /. troll and all, I doubt he has ever needed one, or ever will.
which was my point. too subtle?
Sadly, my not getting the joke rarely has anything to do with the quality of the joke itself.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
...which the CDC considers harmful to humans and has placed the two last known remaining copies at strategically placed bunkers in different parts of the US.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Here is something that might help. Excerpt: "And now...the rest of the story: I'll take you on a short tour of NT's lineage, which leads back to Digital and its VMS OS. Most of NT's lead developers, including VMS's chief architect, came from Digital, and their background heavily influenced NT's development. After I talk about NT's roots, I'll discuss the more-than-coincidental similarities between NT and VMS, and how Digital reacted to NT's release. . ."
Link:
http://windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=4494
Actually, what made x86 and Windows dominant, was the PC Clone market :
A huge market with lots of companies competing by producing even cheaper version of the same product, following (approximately) the same standard.
Mass production makes the product widely available, and cheap.
Thus PCs got easier to get for much less money, even if they where shittier than the better, but more expensive and more scarce Amiga computers.
The 68k is a whole different story. It actually enjoyed a good success, become almost omnipresent in home consoles, arcade machines, embed controllers, UNIX workstations, early Macs, etc...
If you don't restrict yourself to the desktop computer category, the 68k was very widespread.
Its just that one product got widespread (the PC compatibile clone) and it tended to use a weird CPU. Everything else used mostly 68k.
Just the same way as today, Intel has a quasi monopoly, only when exclusively considering desktop computer. Loosen your definition of CPU and start including embed platforms, handhelds and smart phone, and suddenly the quasi monopolist is ARM. Followed by MIPS, and SuperH, with x86 a distant contender.
(and if you admit an even wider definition of CPU, PIC microcontroller will probably be overwhelmingly more widespread than anything else)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Its the same basic stuff we use today with color graphics thrown in for a thrill. The appeal of this sort of thing is really odd.
It begs the question:
Why are we still stuck with this archaic style of operating system after all these decades ?
Its so dated in the face of todays needs that we are supplementing file browsing with a brute force string search
to find our stuff. Funnier still we tout this crude bandaid on defunct technology as new and innovative technology.
I once thought that computer technology would amount to something in my lifetime.
Now we sit around waiting for the year of the Linux desktop, the free version of 40 year old shit.
I don't understand why it wasn't being given away 20 years ago.
FWIW, some friends and I managed to make a printout of PDP11/20 assembler of first edition unix into electronic form and get it running in an emulator last year:
http://code.google.com/p/unix-jun72/
Actually, all these OS' lead back to the Berkeley Timesharing System (1964). So do many of the relevant people.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.