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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."
Every modern OS can trace back to Unix in some way or form.
VMS? Windows? ReactOS? Plan9? QNX? Tron? zOS?
I wouldn't call VMS modern...
Windows: take a look in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ some time. See any Unix style influences?
The others I have no clue about.
QNX (pronounced /kju n ks/ or /kju nks/) is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market
I would call that Unix. I can't find much info on TRON but it seems to be a not very modern OS in terms of design. zOS works on one processor architecture that is proprietary to IBM to run on mainframes, as such it isn't exactly a general use OS and you could probably find some Unix in it if you looked hard enough.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Are those Unix influences, or influences from an OS predating Unix? i.e. the same source that caused Unix to adopt that style? You make it sound like there was nothing before Unix.
Almost nothing. Unix was created on The Second Day.
Bow-ties are cool.
VMS came after Unix so calling it a not very modern OS is kind of odd. X-Windows was never supposed to be Unix specific in fact there was even a version for DeskView way back when.
WindowsNT really owes more to VMS than Unix the chief architect came from Digital. Tron also came after Unix as well. zOS is still an extremely important OS so just because it only runs on one CPU I wouldn't just thow it away as well. As to finding some Unix in zOS frankly you would probably find more zOS in modern Unix than the other way around. IBM really did pretty much invent everything that Bell Labs did not and they where their first.
I really am not fond of the the write up about QNX. It is Unix like in someways and shares an API with it. but QNX is a micro kernel RTOS.
And lets be very honest. Unix came from Multics. Every OS has built on and taken ideas from other OS's. None of them is the pure root source.
I am a big Linux fan but I often wonder if we are too willing to keep Unix as our foundation. BeOS was a clean new OS and while I have never used it wonder if it may not be better than Linux and WindowsNT. It did some amazing things back in the day.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Original flavor. All the stuff talked about in this article comes from before UNIX split into its hundreds of variants. In fact, these are so early that they come from before UNIX escaped out of Bell Labs. UNIX didn't start splitting into different flavors until about Versions 4 and 5.
Tron is the most used OS in the world.
It was invented in Japan and is an embedded device OS.
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.
sail, at least, is part of the "bsdgames" package on Debian.
Bow-ties are cool.
Are you for real? Windows NT's kernel was practicaly a copy of VMS, it wasn't "inspired by UNIX". VMS was based on RSX. RSX came to be at approximately the same time as UNIX, circa 1970. RSX and VMS were influenced by UNIX allright, in a negative way - if UNIX did something, RSX and VMS definitely wanted to do it some other way.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
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.
No. There is nothing useful to be learned from history.
Close your eyes, put the pedal to the metal, and assume that whatever you're doing, it's the right thing, and that nobody has ever tried it before.
May we live long and die out
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, 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.