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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."
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"
Unix really was one of the few programs to determine the fate of an entire industry. Every modern OS can trace back to Unix in some way or form. Keeping the history of Unix especially the early releases and plans can help better document the historical software.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Only if you know it is going in a straight line.
wake up and hold your nose
VMS? Windows? ReactOS? Plan9? QNX? Tron? zOS?
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.
Maybe they're looking for the stolen SCO code in Linux?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Not true - for example, if shown the first 3 cycles of a sinusoidal wave, I'm sure you could predict the next cycle. There are lots of non-linear numeric sequences that allow for relatively accurate predictions.
Obviously, history is more complicated, but idea is the same.
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.
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 studied this and found that June 4th, 2014 will be the start of the year of the Linux Desktop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Someone will trot out a copy of the Morris worm and we can relive history all over again.
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.
Old source code gives us ideas,
Like "WTF did they do here?!", "Why did they do it THAT way?!" and "That has got to be the ugliest kludge I've ever seen!"
Of course its also invaluable to have their nemisises Multics and VMS alos preserved.
Multics was hardly a 'nemesis' of Unix. Multics was basically dead when Unix arrived; its death inspired Ken Thompson and company to work on Unix.
My blog
pitty the world will end in 2012 :(