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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."
Those that don't learn UNIX are doomed to reinvent it. Poorly.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Overgeneralization.
Old source code gives us ideas, like looking at the design philosophy behind the code, and the ultimate operation of the software. These are actually *priceless* artifacts, and since they are mostly digital ( reserive the right for first pun... they are 'Digital' ), the study and the disemination of the early code is of extrodinary value to coders and software architects.
Of course its also invaluable to have their nemisises Multics and VMS alos preserved. I personally got an enourmous amount of respect for K&R reading the source code for the kernel (the V4), and the proto compiler. K&R, and the linux/GNU write well, wereas their MS counterparts wirte pretty crappy stuff. I would also venture to guess that the code alone can serve as an example of how to write code.
I will look forward to taking a detailed 'History of the UNIX Kernel' class in the near future.