Inventors of Unix Win Japan Prize

jbrodkin writes "The inventors of Unix and the C programming language, one of whom also created the first master-level chess-playing machine, have been awarded the prestigious Japan Prize for their work in building the Unix operating system in 1969. Ken Thompson, who is now a distinguished engineer at Google, and Dennis Ritchie, who is retired, were researchers at Bell Labs four decades ago when they 'developed the Unix operating system which has significantly advanced computer software, hardware and networks over the past four decades, and facilitated the realization of the Internet,' the Japan Prize Foundation said Tuesday in awarding them the 2011 prize. The pair join previous winners such as Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. In addition to developing Unix, Thompson also played a key role in building Belle, the first chess-playing computer to achieve a master-level rating and five-time winner of the now-defunct North American Computer Chess Championship in the 1970s and 1980s. Ritchie and Thompson have also been credited with developing the C programming language, a process that occurred in conjunction with the development of Unix."

Comments

mad props

[inode_buddha]

and congrats... 40 years later their influence is still amazing.

Re:mad props

[Anonymous Coward]

You apparently never used Unix during the 70s and 80s. Unix "security" was a constant joke at least until the mid 90s.

Re:mad props

[Anonymous Coward]

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook [pdf]

Foreword
By Donald A. Norman

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook? Why? Of what earthly good could it be? Who is the audience? What a perverted idea.

But then again, I have been sitting here in my living room—still wearing my coat—for over an hour now, reading the manuscript. One and one-half hours. What a strange book. But appealing. Two hours. OK, I give up: I like it. It’s a perverse book, but it has an equally perverse appeal. Who would have thought it: Unix, the hacker’s pornography.

When this particular rock-throwing rabble invited me to join them, I thought back to my own classic paper on the subject, so classic it even got reprinted in a book of readings. But it isn’t even referenced in this one. Well, I’ll fix that:

Norman, D. A. The Trouble with Unix: The User Interface is Horrid. Datamation, 27 (12) 1981, November. pp. 139-150. Reprinted in Pylyshyn, Z. W., & Bannon, L. J., eds. Perspectives on the Computer Revolution, 2nd revised edition, Hillsdale, NJ, Ablex, 1989.

What is this horrible fascination with Unix? The operating system of the 1960s, still gaining in popularity in the 1990s. A horrible system, except that all the other commercial offerings are even worse. The only operating system that is so bad that people spend literally millions of dollars trying to improve it. Make it graphical (now that’s an oxymoron, a graphical user interface for Unix).

You know the real trouble with Unix? The real trouble is that it became so popular. It wasn’t meant to be popular. It was meant for a few folks working away in their labs, using Digital Equipment Corporation’s old PDP-11 computer. I used to have one of those. A comfortable, room-sized machine. Fast—ran an instruction in roughly a microsecond. An elegant instruction set (real programmers, you see, program in assembly code). Toggle switches on the front panel. Lights to show you what was in the registers. You didn’t have to toggle in the boot program anymore, as you did with the PDP-1 and PDP-4, but aside from that it was still a real computer. Not like those toys we have today that have no flashing lights, no register switches. You can’t even single-step today’s machines. They always run at full speed.

The PDP-11 had 16,000 words of memory. That was a fantastic advance over my PDP-4 that had 8,000. The Macintosh on which I type this has 64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM? Unix was designed before the days of CRT displays on the console. For many of us, the main input/output device was a 10-character/second, all uppercase teletype (advanced users had 30- character/second teletypes, with upper- and lowercase, both). Equipped with a paper tape reader, I hasten to add. No, those were the real days of computing. And those were the days of Unix. Look at Unix today: the remnants are still there. Try logging in with all capitals. Many Unix systems will still switch to an all-caps mode. Weird.

Unix was a programmer’s delight. Simple, elegant underpinnings. The user interface was indeed horrible, but in those days, nobody cared about such things. As far as I know, I was the very first person to complain about it in writing (that infamous Unix article): my article got swiped from my computer, broadcast over UUCP-Net, and I got over 30 single-spaced pages of taunts and jibes in reply. I even got dragged to Bell Labs to stand up in front of an overfilled auditorium to defend myself. I survived. Worse, Unix survived.

Unix was designed for the computing environment of then, not the machines of today. Unix survives only because everyone else has done so badly. There were many valuable things to be learned from Unix: how come nobody learned them and then did better? Started from scratch and produced a really superior, modern, graphical operating system? Oh yeah,

Re:mad props

[JWW]

UNIX was designed to be as scalable, robust, and secure (relative to standards in those days) as they could possibly build it.

Redirection, Pipes, shells, heck the whole IO structure of UNIX was/is IMHO a great work of art.

Then other people started adding stuff to UNIX and eventually Linux that just kept making it better and better like PERL, Apache, X, .... many more.

UNIX is just and has always been good stuff.

Re:mad props

[phek]

The main reason i see for it is in comparison to most other OSs, everything* can be accessed as a file. This includes most devices and sockets. That has made unix very agile and has allowed it to adapt with the times. The only OS i can think of that goes further than unix in this respect is plan 9, which was also designed by bell labs as the successor to unix. Plan 9 goes as far as allowing peripherals on the network to be accessed as files.

Re:mad props

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

It's not so much about security as it is about flexibility and a new way of doing things. At the time Unix was created, most operating systems where huge, ugly and complex beasts, developed in a bureaucratic way by enormous corporations. Software development was done similarly to the way processors are designed. It was a land of engineers, not a land of hackers. Unix was simpler, more elegant, modular and hacker friendly. At the time, OSs where written in assembly, almost no exceptions. Have you ever seen a mainframe sysadmin? Those guys where running the circus back then. Then this bunch of hippies came in and wrote an OS in a high-level language, and it turned out to be awesome. Unix was the software-world response to the social events and revolutions during the 60's.

At first, it wasn't as evolved or secure as other systems, and it was ridiculed because of that. But Unix is like Lego, and there was a huge amount of young people in computing that related to this concept, and could do awesome things with the building blocks provided by Unix.

It was the first OS to change the way things where done and introduce metaphors in computing. People think thap FApple and m$ started the metaphor-in-computing trend, with icons, menues and folders. That's just not true. "Everything is a file" was a revolution. The simple, short commands, pipes, advanced interactive shells, all of that made Unix the choice of a new generation. And it still is, anyone serious about software development is on some kind of Unix variant. It's wasn't the technical merits of Unix, it was the philosophy that made it so huge.

I once asked RMS if he could imagine the Free Software world as it is today, developing something like the Incompatible time-sharing system. Of course, this is RMS and I didn't really get a straight answer, he just rambled about how it wasn't a valid question because the Incompatible time-sharing system wasn't modern enough to be usable nowdays. But I know the answer is NO. The Unix model and Free Software have a LOT in common, and Unix helped pave the way for the way the world works right now. Whether the usual suspects like it or not, Free Software runs most of the Internet, and the world as we know wouldn't exist without the internet. Unix has always been the man behind the curtain, but it's been more relevant in the last 40 years of history than many think. Even now, it's still obscure, think, for instance, how everyone has a Unix OS in their pocket (Android phones/tablets and other devices, ipods/iphones/ipads), and most don't even know about it. It was about damn time that it got some mainstream recognition.

Thanks to Unix

[MrEricSir]

...you can download all the Japanese anime tentacle pr0n you ever wanted!

The real story

[dkleinsc]

Ken actually used his nifty hack of the C compiler and the login program to break into the computer that stored the committee's votes and flipped his and Steve Ballmer's vote.

Re:The real story

[$RANDOMLUSER]

It's not a "nifty hack", it's the Greatest Hack of All Time - past, present and future, in all Time Lines, and in all Parallel Universes and Dimensions(TM). The fact that he did it in the 70's, before anybody else was really even trying, just adds to the wonderment of it. If there were a Nobel Prize for Deviousness, he would have won it hands down, and then they would have retired the prize, as having "been done".

the rest of the story

[Anonymous Coward]

Thompson and Ritchie invented Unix and C because they needed a decent programming environment for the PDP-7 to develop their game "Space Wars". To my knowledge, the Bell Labs Space Wars title still hasn't shipped, thus inaugurating the tradition of galactic video game vaporware that continues to this day.

Instrumental in creating commercial Internet

[spun]

Here is the actual Al Gore quote:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Clumsy and self serving wording, yes. Claims to have invented the Internet? No, not at all. He was just saying that his policies helped create the Internet as we know it today, which is somewhat true. What he REALLY did was cosponsor the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992 which opened the Internet to commercial traffic.

So, we can really thank Gore for pop-up ads and spam, not the whole Internet.

While Unix is great, I looooooove C =)

[ackthpt]

After struggling for years with a dozen programming languages I instantly fell in love with C because I could write tight code which compiled tiny and executed swiftly. Libraries were friendly (compared to Fortran, PL/1, Cobol, etc.) and who could not love linked lists? I liked it so much I bought too copies of The C Programming Language by Dennis Ritchie & Brian Kernighan - one copy for work and one for home.

It's sad to see the crap I have to code in now. =(

Thompson can't check-in code at Google because...

[PatPending]

Let's not forget this: Google won't allow the co-inventor of Unix and the C language to check-in code, because he won't take the mandatory language test. Quote: Legendary programmer Ken Thompson, for example, was required to prove his mettle at a programming language he himself co-invented before Google would deploy his programs. He never bothered, at least not by the time the book Coders at Work was published.

The next one will go to BS.

[master_p]

Bjarne Stroustrup, that is. After all, C++ has those ++ over C...

Multics?

[Tablizer]

Multics was heavily influential in the development of Unix. The inventor(s) of Multics perhaps deserve as much credit.

Platform neutral

[SplashMyBandit]

One of the greatest things of UNIX was that it was designed to be machine-neutral as much as possible. That meant you would have this common framework that would be available anywhere and everywhere.

The C programming language was designed with the same platform-abstracting ideas in mind. Unfortunately later C libraries (past those of ANSI/ISO C) started becoming more and more platform specific (mostly as a result of vendors either doing it "their way" or deliberately tying people to their platform). Later on, Java would grow for the same reason again, but with far more extensive standardized libraries covering what people wanted to do in the Internet Age (sockets, HTTP, multi-threading, platform-independent GUI [Swing with Nimbus looks great and performs well ever since rendering was fully hardware accelerated in 1.6.0_u10]).

Unfortunately we're at the stage where vendors are seeking to close things out again. Apple makes wonderful hardware but their walled garden approach is counterproductive from a global industry perspective (and why they will arguably 'fail' to set the standards for software a second time around, for the same reasons, but will make a colossal amount of money anyway). Google's Android is better, but is still a little bit of a walled garden. Hopefully innovation in profit will move elsewhere ('standardization' of one sort or another eventually comes to almost all technologies) and allow things to settle down in the phone space - and allow the cross-platform ideals of UNIX to once again return. One day I hope that phones are sufficiently powerful (processing and energy/battery life) that developing for them is as simple as for the embedded, desktop and server spaces (which have specialized libraries but are essentially the same these days [if you are using Java]).

Re:Platform neutral

[jluzwick]

Android is becoming more open with each update. If you look at some of Gingerbread's new features, they allow for more developers to code the way they want to, specifically you can now write a Android application completely in C and C++. The NDK has become much more evolved and allows for greater access to Google's Android. Chris Pruett has a great article on what Google has done with this latest update, particularly with the NDK. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gingerbread-ndk-awesomeness.html

Re:While Unix is great, I looooooove C =)

[PolygamousRanchKid]

The highest accolade for C came from my Computer Music professor, Paul Lansky: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lansky . He did stuff with FORTRAN, which he described as a "clunky" language, and then started moving to C. I can't remember the precise words that he used, but he seemed to get across that programming in C was like composing music for him.

A music professor? Programming in C? Yep, that happens.

Re:Thompson can't check-in code at Google because.

[lordandmaker]

I still don't really understand the problem here. He goes on to say (even in the quote in Coders At Work I think) that it's not some principled refusal to (why would you do that?), and it's not like stuff's being held up because he can't check in code. It's just that he's "found no need to". His ban on checking code in was just a technicality.

Besides, he's since gone on to work on Go for them, so I'm guessing he did feel a need to be able to check code in, and probably just took the test.

Re:Yeah, they got it right.

[phek]

OSX is unix with an aqua graphical user interface/theme.