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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."
Fork off!
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.