The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

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The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 2, 2011 @06:45AM from the not-quite-over-the-hill dept.

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."

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Re:Future by swanzilla · 2011-12-02 06:56 · Score: 5, Funny

I can see some form of UNIX making it to the 22nd century and beyond.
+1 Forth-sightful

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0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Re:Future by jellomizer · 2011-12-02 06:56 · Score: 5, Funny

Not the 32bit versions though. They wont make it past 2038.

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If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Re:user experience by DrSkwid · 2011-12-02 08:02 · Score: 5, Funny

Unix is perfectly user friendly, it's just careful who it is friends with.

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There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
So basically what AT&T still does with Android by Kamiza+Ikioi · 2011-12-02 08:03 · Score: 3, Funny

'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.'

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I8-D
Re:Future by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-02 08:15 · Score: 5, Funny

Is that a Sunday?
Re:The heydays ended ten years ago by sunderland56 · 2011-12-02 08:17 · Score: 3, Funny

Several OSes are UNIX, including Mac OS and Solaris.
Right, of course, I had *totally* forgotten that MacOS and Solaris were binary compatible. My bad.

Good thing I didn't confuse the terms "Unix" and "POSIX compliant". That would have been embarrasing.
Re:So THEY invented "RTFM!" by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-02 08:20 · Score: 3, Funny

You should be aware that RTFM hasa different meaning in the Windows world: Reboot The Fucking Machine
Re:Future by philfr · 2011-12-02 10:19 · Score: 4, Funny

Not sure, but the restaurant out there is open 24/7.