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The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
riverat1 writes "After AT&T dropped the Multics project in March of 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs continued to work on the project, through a combination of discarded equipment and subterfuge, eventually writing the first programming manual for System I in November 1971. A paper published in 1974 in the Communications of the ACM on Unix brought a flurry of requests for copies. Since AT&T was restricted from selling products not directly related to telephones or telecommunications, they released it to anyone who asked for a nominal license fee. At conferences they displayed the policy on a slide saying, 'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.' From that grew an ecosystem of users supporting users much like the Linux community. The rest is history."
I can see some form of UNIX making it to the 22nd century and beyond.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
since the old versions were known as Version 5, Version 7, and so on.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
For those few who are new here and don't know what RTFM means, read the RTFM!
Image from wikimedia of the UNIX Family Tree
The heydays ended ten years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_systems_used_on_top_500_supercomputers.svg
The culprit? Linux.
Sure wish Microsoft, who with the hindsight of Xenix, had adopted more *ix practices in Windows. I know some are there, but buried. Windows is such a pile of muck in a darkened room and when I first had my hands on an *ix system I fell in love with the simplicity and flexibility of it. Then there was Linux - build according to your needs, which utterly blew my mind. How long until we finally say Good-bye to non-*ix system architecture?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"in 2008 Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which affected some versions that were released in 2001"
i rest my case
I remember the first time I saw Unix, in 1976. The first step in installing it was to compile the C compiler (supplied IIRC in PDP-11 assembler) and then compile the kernal, and then the shell and all the utilities. You had an option as to whether you wanted to put the man pages online since they took up a significant (in those days) amount of disk space. Make was not yet released by AT&T so this was all done either by typing at the command line or (once the shell was running) from shell scripts.
note that the entire history of Unix is permeated with history of lawyer intervention and lawsuits, all thanks to the copyright and patent laws that exist because of government and that are enforced by government agencies and courts. This is just one more reason to abolish all patents and copyrights.
You can't handle the truth.
Are you saying all gamers are idiots?
It's interesting how AT&T couldn't support it for this reason, because today, UNIX is at the heart of both iOS and Android, which run some of today's most popular telephones.
Several issues of the Bell System Technical Journal tell the story of UNIX, in their own words. This one in particular is interesting.
No, some gamers don't prefer Windows, they just boot it as a second OS to play.
Dilbert RSS feed
Well, if you read the Microsoft EULA, you'll notice that they don't promise bug fixes either. It just isn't advertised that way (although they definitely do supply advertising)... and sometimes the support just consists of "yes, I think that's unfortunate, too".
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I also prefer it as desktop OS, and not just for games. I use Linux on servers because that's where it shines best, but Linux in general either doesn't have the desktop programs I want or they're poor options. Like for example I love PHPEdit for editing php files, like I do with Visual Studio for .NET programs. Linux lacks compared to those, especially if you want to develop with C# or any other sane higher level language or for Windows. Another case is photo editing. There's both Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro along with several video editing programs and website designing programs like Artisteer. Those don't support Linux and there just isn't anything equivalent. Linux totally lacks on software catalog side of things. There just isn't any programs available.
Makes me wonder whether or not we'd be using as many Windows machines had the government allowed AT&T to sell and market Unix.
No, just the ones who don't know how to install and use wine.
I've worked with Unix twice. The first time in 1996 and the second time from November 2011 to June of this year. It is as user unfriendly now as it was in 1996.
Makes me wonder whether or not we'd be using as many Windows machines had the government allowed AT&T to sell and market Unix.
We probably would. If ATT had been allowed to sell Unix, it almost certainly would have priced it way too high for IBM's taste.
Indeed, ATT tried selling a Unix-based personal computer (which, with typical former-Bell-System flair, they termed the "AT&T Unix PC") in the mid-80s, after they'd divested the local phone companies and could legally do whatever they wanted. It flopped, since it was obscenely priced at $5000, which was about twice the price of a fully-loaded DOS PC.
Unless you buy windows on a disk in a cardboard box, the only support you will get is some minimum wage tech in india employed by dell/hp/etc.
So (after probably sticking their tongue out at the lawyers who originally nixed the release) they released UNIX ... and were then sued by other computer companies for violating the "phones only" clause of the anti-trust agreement. AT&T also lost that battle.
So now it was law. They couldn't suppress the technology, but they couldn't market or support it because it wasn't directly phone- related. That's where they came up with the rather convoluted system where, for a nominal price ($1 for universities, and more ($20K, I think for companies), and signing a non-disclosure agreement, anybody could get a mag tape with a working system, and source code, a pat on the back and a 'good luck'.
ALL support was done by users (who, pretty early on got better at it than any company would have been) -- but the non-disclosure agreement meant that you couldn't just post a file with the fixed code in it... so that's where diff(1) patches came into play -- they exposed the fix without exposing too much of the source code. In some cases where patches were extensive, the originator of the patch would simply announce it and require people to fax a copy of the first page of their license before being emailed the fix.
AT&T was also rather pedantic about protecting their trademark, which resulted in people often using the UN*X moniker rather than include the trademark footnote at the end of their postings.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I am even more lazy.
I just realize that a little bit of work upfront can save me more work later or even allow me to achieve something new with minimal effort.
Unix users are no less lazy. They're just a little smarter about it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And the recent attempts to merge with T-Mobile aren't enough to tell you why your statement is beyond reckless?
Makes me wonder whether or not we could even afford to pay for cellular service had the government allowed AT&T to circumvent government; regulation in the interest of the "user".
Actually, KDevelop, Anjuita, SourceNavigator, Kylix are pretty good IDE for linux. And MSVS compared to Borland IDE (CodeGear now) sucks, to say it plainly.
any other sane higher level language
Is Java an insane higher level language? What about Eclipse, which works well with a whole range of high AND low level languages?
There just isn't any programs available.
I find that most of my needs are met. In fact, a lot of the programs I use on Windows were ported from Linux. The only piece of software I pay for (a developers merge tool) had it's origins on Windows, but they sell a Linux port - presumably in recognition of the fact that so many professionals find Linux machines productive.
If you want to do C#, Monodevelop is available, although was distinctly inferior to it's Windows progenitor, SharpDevelop, the last I looked. But that's also true of Mono itself, IMHO. Aristeer is written in C#, so in principle there's no reason it couldn't be run on Mono / Linux, unless it uses some of the features that Mono hasn't caught up with yet.
For PHP (and a host of other things too) there's Komodo IDE (with it's free / Open counterpart Komodo Edit).
You probably have a point on the media side of things. But I think a media person could justifiably prefer OS X to Windows.
Seems like this sort of story always brings out the low number /.'ers. I remember one post in the last few years where each reply was by a lower post until someone showed up with a number under 1000. (If I remember right, lol. Memory is not my strong suit now. And the older I get, the less I can about that. lol)
While this was all happening, I was changing vacuum tubes in military crypto boxes. lol Hell, I remember my dad testing our TV's vacuum tubes at the A&P grocery store.
Didn't your beloved Apache web server have a major security vulnerability for just as many years? Despite it being open source...
The good old ad hominem attack. I guess the truth hurts.
So you prefer the programs that run on Windows, but I still don't hear an argument for Windows itself.
My first encounter with UNIX was learning it on a dialup system back in the days when CP/M was still the user operating system. It looked to me like a vast rolling trrainwreck that was continually evolved to keep it more or less functional. Teams of wizards surrounded it and made lots of money from its care and feeding. I became one of the wizards. But I still hated it. And do.
Come on dude, we're talking about server systems here, not desktop unix which isn't exactly a "consumer" product. FYI, only a handful of linux people actually want linux to "take over the desktop". The rest of us have already preferred it for 15 years.
'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.'
I8-D
Also, try to find a Linux equivalent to WinMerge. There is none. KDiff is the closest you can get, but not close enough. I've been using Linux to compile Android kernels and WinMerge is perfect for getting a high level view what the various kernel devs (who don't use git properly) have done to the stock Samsung kernel source.
I resorted to Running WinMerge under Wine. It crashes whenever I do certain functions, but the native linux alternatives are so bad that I put up with it.
And don't get me started on gnome. Holy crap what an abomination. I used to enjoy the KDE 3.x series on my FreeBSD desktops. It was functional and relatively customizable, but this transition of the linux community to gnome boggles my mind, even with the clusterfuck that Kde 4.x series was/is. KDE 3.x is still better than the current Gnome IMO.
And before anyone replys, yes, I know I can choose a distro that uses KDE or install it myself. I've been around that block, and will be doing it again soon.
-1 Flamebait
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
And what's the problem with Windows 7? It boots fast, doesn't crash, the file system is reliable, and its memory footprint is smaller than OS X or Ubuntu. My only real complaint is that the included commandline tools are weak.
photoshop can run in wine , there is a paintshop portable app which works perfectly in wine or on windows. It's not legal of course. Although there is no reason you couldn't buy a legal version with a licence. ...
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
No other argument is needed.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Unless you are a major corporation and have a contract with Microsoft the only support you get is reinstall-reinstall-reinstall, with Open Source you get to contact the developers directly ...
There's a talk from 1986 by Richard Hamming at Bellcore, about how to do great research, but it also ends up in a short discussion about the conditions there that led to UNIX:
http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
The whole talk is really excellent, and there's this theme in it that the really great things come from some unexpected places, by the compounding of seemingly unrelated character traits, work habits and organization dynamics.
At the end in the Q&A, Hamming gets into a short discussion with the host Alan Chynoweth about the origins of UNIX, evincing from Alan a favorite quote:
"UNIX was never a deliverable!"
expanded:
"Hamming: First let me respond to Alan Chynoweth about computing. I [was in charge of] computing in research and for 10 years I kept telling my management, ``Get that !&@#% machine out of research. We are being forced to run problems all the time. We can't do research because we're too busy operating and running the computing machines.'' Finally the message got through. They were going to move computing out of research to someplace else. I was persona non grata to say the least and I was surprised that people didn't kick my shins because everybody was having their toy taken away from them. I went in to Ed David's office and said, ``Look Ed, you've got to give your researchers a machine. If you give them a great big machine, we'll be back in the same trouble we were before, so busy keeping it going we can't think. Give them the smallest machine you can because they are very able people. They will learn how to do things on a small machine instead of mass computing.'' As far as I'm concerned, that's how UNIX arose. We gave them a moderately small machine and they decided to make it do great things. They had to come up with a system to do it on. It is called UNIX!
A. G. Chynoweth: I just have to pick up on that one. In our present environment, Dick, while we wrestle with some of the red tape attributed to, or required by, the regulators, there is one quote that one exasperated AVP came up with and I've used it over and over again. He growled that, ``UNIX was never a deliverable!''"
The article is well written but I am not sure they have checked their facts ... here is a direct quote from the article ....
"It even runs some supercomputers."
Now ... just head over to the TOP500 page (http://i.top500.org/stats) and sort by OS ..... I wouldn't call > 80 % just 'some supercomputers'
???
... if music be fruit of love, play on
Just wait for the next version...
" WinMerge 3 will be modern compare/synchronization tool. It will be based on Qt library and cross-platform. You can use the same tool in Windows and in Linux. "
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
... and its memory footprint is smaller than OS X or Ubuntu ...
[citation needed]
Really interested not trolling.
If you are droning on about Photoshop then you are a poser that has no clue what Photoshop is used for. It's a canned Lemming Troll for idiots with no real clue.
I do my professional work with Photoshop. I wouldn't say I'm an artist (artists don't paint with computers), but I have very professional use for it. Yet you say I have no clue what it is used for. Care to tell me what it's good for, then?
Awesome!
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
The reason Windows, Mac OS and pretty much all consumer and small business OSs became successes is because they were cheap. DOS and Windows, in particular, became dominant because of the OEM ecosystem. Support and bugfixes? Microsoft support has always been expensive, and bugfixes for the operating system didn't even become widely distributed until Windows vulnerabilities reached a level where Microsoft was essentially forced to come up with Windows Updates to dole out its bugfixes in a much easier way. When I first started out administering Windows NT based systems, bugfixes only came regularly with service packs, or if you installed them based on advice from Microsoft directly or via KB articles, or because some guy on randomtechforum.com told you "yeah, KB28342818122 will fix your problem." And earlier versions of Windows sure the hell didn't even have that level of support. Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 were what they were and about the only way you would get updates is if it was shipped with some piece of software that needed to update a DLL or other support file.
It little or nothing to do with support. Until Linux came along and basic took the expensive licensing and support costs associated with most *nix operating systems, *nix vendors didn't even give a shit about the PC market, and regarded PCs as glorified terminals when and where they had to connect to *nix-based systems. Still, even on the old Xenix system I administered, there were updates available, the last one I remember installing around 1992 or 1993 was a patch to fix hard-coded originator host names in UUCP bangpaths (and if that doesn't date me, nothing does).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
have you installed powershell yet? It helps a fair bit.
Judging by your original post which mentions both Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro in the same breath, probably not much.
If someone else paid for it, or if you never paid for it at all you can certainly find trivial uses for it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Ironically MicroSoft's first saleable OS was a flavor of UNIX called Xenix. But Xenix on 80286's was really lame compared to UNIX on a PDP-11 or VAX. UNIX wasnt really that efficient on a PC until the 80486s in the mid-1990s. That was fortunately the same time Linus started his version. MicroSoft sold Xenix to SCO after it developed MS-DOS. SCO patent-trolled it unsuccessfully for many years.
Rubbish. Everyone knows the birthplace of Unix was in Jurassic Park.
> , and its memory footprint is smaller than OS X or Ubuntu
No it isn't. Not by a long stretch.
Set your sights a little lower. This is a monopoly product you are talking about. If you try to talk nonsense, all of use that are forced to use it by corporate overlords or have to fix computers for relatives are going to know that you're full of it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The "first brood" of high level languages- COBOL, LISP and FORTRAN- are well into their 2nd half century. I would not be surprised if they last a century along with UNIX and C.
Sandusky?
No brain, no pain.
Nice piece. A bit incorrect about multiplexing as Burroughs had released the B-5500/5700 in 1966 that allowed multiple terminals and running the CANDE ( Command And Edit interface) allowed batch jobs and terminals to run simulatinously, unlike IBM computers of the day which were batch orietented for almost 10 years later.
I paid for it myself. Like I said, I use it for work, so can pay too.
Valgrind and Git. I rest my case on software development tools.
the worth thing of this history is that it repeated again and again: some one in financial or marketing team cut founds for an intesting and inovating project, and some stupid technical guys works in their free time with discarted equipment, and ...
I work in the old Lucent and see this history may times in the last 10 years.
its memory footprint is smaller than OS X or Ubuntu.
Get real man, I have a working desktop Linux on a machine from 1998 which has only 96 megs of RAM and 266MHz CPU. Even XP wouldn't run on something that old. And with the right choice of desktop environment, the machine can still run a lot of modern desktop software.
*Googles for literally 3 seconds*:
Gnome
KDE
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Re: "major security vulnerability"
Yeah and cos Apache has hosted more than half the web for years that would make it a big fish for hackers to exploit... and the number of web hosts adversely affected by this bug are?
Whatever the number (small no doubt), has it crippled Apache's share of the web hosting pie?
I'm sure you get my point.
No, but you are an idiot for coming to that conclusion (and also for the OP).
Are you that fucking stupid to think that I could compile my own working Android kernel, yet not find Kdiff and Meld?
Those are the first two things I tried and neither compare to WinMerge.
Someone else bothered to go into detail if you care:
http://petermoulding.com/what_is_the_equivalent_to_winmerge_in_linux
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 7. Ubuntu boots so fast that if I am not paying attention it is up before I realize it and log in is just as responsive. Windows 7 on the hand takes about double the time to the log in screen, and then there is a wait at least as long for the machine to become responsive enough to use.
Granted, this on a machine with only 2 GB of RAM. But running the same applications on each OS presents a world of difference (Remote Support Client [supports both OSes], Lotus Notes 8.5 full feature, Chrome Browser, Skype, plus a RDC client). Linux responses and functions, while I generally have to wait and be patient for Windows. Needless to say, I find myself only using Windows when I must (Microsoft Access mainly, but occasionally the RDC client since it supports Windows 7 and Server 2008).
But then to be fair, I am forced to run the bloated piece of crap called Symantec Endpoint Protection on the Windows 7 side of life. However, it doesn't excuse the poor performance prior to it starting.
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
So you prefer the programs that run on Windows, but I still don't hear an argument for Windows itself.
Well, gosh, that sounds like a fairly decent argument for Windows right there.
"Hi, I run Linux."
"And I run Windows."
"(Sneer) I'm super reliable. And free! And Open Source!!! (Angelic music cue.)"
"Oh, nice. What programs do you run?"
"Ummm, none. But I'm very, very stable while I'm sitting at rest, doing nothing!"
"Err, well, golly, isn't that nice..."
"You poor sucker. You're Windows. You BSOD all the time while you're running Photoshop."
"Well, actually, I haven't seen a blue screen of death in ages. Windows is pretty stable now. How about you? Stable, huh? No problems running Photoshop, I bet..."
"Umm, well, actually I can't run Photoshop. But anyone who wanted to get a team of coders and expert graphics editors together to dedicate a few years of their life could write an open source and free equivalent and it'd be lightning fast."
"But, look, I hate to press the matter, but what do you run now, not in the theoretical future?"
"Well, nothing. But I do it really, really well."
(Pats Linux on the head...)
Actually it might if you use the full disk encryption part of the endpoint. I do and it absolutely sucks, including the fact that if I boot my laptop on the docking station I have to open the laptop to do the initial login as my external keyboard does not work before the encryption is unlocked. Symantec Endpoint just plain sucks.
"in 2008 Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which affected some versions that were released in 2001" i rest my case
It's not the bugfixes people want. It's the perception of bugfixes. Remember, perception is reality.
Then stop using cmd and switch to powershell -- which also comes with windows 7.
Heck, how'd that happen, after they lost their dangling participles?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I thought it was a Mach kernel and a BSD userland. How exactly that's quintessentially different from me installed Cygwin on my Windows machine and calling it a Unix machine is beyond me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx//arch.html
This is comical indeed, but not exactly accurate. I started dual-booting a couple of months ago, just to try it out. Frankly, there isn't much I can do on Windows 7 that I can't do on Xubuntu. There may be no Visual Studio but there is Netbeans. Everyone knows about the lack of gaming support. Even if I quit playing games, I'll probably never be able to replace Windows for one reason: Windows Media Center. I've tried MythTV and sadly, it doesn't come close. In fact, it downright blows in a lot of ways. Maybe someday I'll write a new UI for it but my skillz aren't quite there yet.
Apple is the largest UNIX vendor in the world right now...
Trolling is a art,
True enough, eventually one comes to try emacs and then they realize that platform lock is silly and needless.
What version of Symantec Endpoint Protection are you running? I work for the company, and we spent a lot of time focused on performance in the latest release.
'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.'
No advertising?
And they're not really selling "Android" the operating system - Google does that; they sell/offer it to their customers, who are, in this case, phone (and tablet) manufacturers. AT&T are selling phones that run Android (just as they sell phones that run iOS and Windows Phone).
I don't know whether AT&T or the phone manufacturer would be the ones responsible for providing support and/or bug fixes in this case.
Your new I can tell.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Nah, I've been reading /. since it started. If I'd registered when I started reading I'd have a four digit UID. (Smugness.) I'm just contrary...they keep me around for comic effect and to be provocative.
I have played with many flavours of Unix, Linux since '92 -- but the GUI is conflicted and never amounted to anything I will likely program. OS X is the best Unix that this old timer has used in my 23 years with the OS.
You might be interested in this: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/
I use git w/diff.external=winmerge and couldn't be happier
bite my glorious golden ass.
Is that why Windows has more bugs and is less reliable than Linux or Mac? MS has never placed a priority on bug fixes and usually uses bugs them as a selling point for users to upgrade to the next version (Windows ME to Windows 95 and Vista to Windows 7 for example.
As far as support is concerned, get your credit card out, just like you would if you were using Red Hat or Open Suse.
especially if you want to develop with C# or any other sane higher level language or for Windows
Of course Windows is a better environment if you are developing for Windows.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When companies stopped buying big iron proprietary RISC servers to put in their datacenters and started putting commodity x86 servers instead, UNIX stagnated. Linux which was seen as a toy prior took advantage of this.
I've never understood the difference b/w System# and Version# in Unix. What does SVR4 mean? What would trigger a change from System III to System V, and what happened to System IV in b/w? If you have releases, why have decimal releases, like SVR3.2, SVR4.2? SCO's Unixware 7.x was supposed to be SVR5. (Oh, and why are System# Roman numerals and Version# Hindu numerals? (I'm not going to call it Arabic, since the Arabs had nothing to do w/ their invention)) How come nobody else, e.g. Sun, thought of coming out w/ an SVR5 Unix?
On a different note, since Open Group owns the trademark and the certification of what's Unix, is there still anything (other than SCO's moribund appeals) preventing SVR4.x and BSD to merge back into a single Unix? Also, aside from DEC, did Open Group retire OSF/1 after the merger of OSF and SVID? Also, if Unixware is a trademark of the Open Group, what exactly is its definition - Unix plus some sort of Netware?
For the current market, is it valid to think of BSD as the only active Unix out there? Yeah, I know Solaris, HP/UX & AIX are still around, but they are all largely platform specific (and if Itanium dies, I think so will HP/UX). Incidentally, anyone know whether if BSD & Linux were subjected to the Open Group's certification tests, they'd both be certified as Unix, just like OS-X is?
You mean that Oracle, IBM, or HP don't offer bug fixes or support? We're talking about Unix now, not some Linux or BSD distro you might download from distrowatch. I find it pretty hard to believe that Oracle, IBM or HP won't support a corporation that buys $$$ worth of hardware & software from them.
But does two hours of pushing broom get an 8 x12 4 bit room?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Unless you buy windows on a disk in a cardboard box, the only support you will get is some minimum wage tech in india employed by dell/hp/etc.
In most countries (USA is not most countries, it is only ONE country), if you buy windows on a disk in a cardboard box, you will get no support from Microsoft at all (other then their web page) and no support from anybody else. Support from minimum wage tech employed by dell/hp/etc. is an improvement to that. Only English speaking countries get support from India, although Indian tech-support-companies are starting to support other languages, e.g. Swedish speakers still get most support from low(er) wage countries like Netherlands (it is reasonably easy to learn Swedish if you know Dutch), South Africa, and Ireland and Scotland (I have no idea as to why someone thought learning Irishmen and Scots Swedish was a good idea, except for the lower wages); Norwegian speakers get their tech support from Sweden (much lower wages, very similar languages); Spanish speakers from the Philippines and South American countries, or Portugal (lower wages, similar languages), French speakers from prior French colonies in Africa and Asia et c.
Interesting, I did not know that. Just out of curiosity, does Canada get similar support to Windows, or are they also "other countries"?