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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."
Image from wikimedia of the UNIX Family Tree
Several issues of the Bell System Technical Journal tell the story of UNIX, in their own words. This one in particular is interesting.
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.
After 2038, when everything is still working despite dire predictions, we will have to wait a bit for the next opportunity, when the 64 bit epoch runs out . . .
64-bit Unix time will run out on December 4, precisely at 3:30:08 PM, 292,277,026,596 AD. It will be a Sunday.
By then I fully expect computers will already have migrated well into the gigabytes-per-machine-word range, or will no longer be using bits as we know them. Either that, or we'll have encountered the heat death of the universe, so it will be irrelevant.
Yes, the camel surely looks elegant in the desert. But then again, fish don't climb trees.
Just because something works well in one area doesn't mean that it will function well outside of that area. This is why there will always be "other methods" for operating systems.
Windows is such an incredibly fragile system - all eggs in one basket. While it made sense for mass sall of PCs with a single disk, by feat it left the programs, work, operating system, registry, swap space, all on one disk. You can choose to save your work done in various suites on other drives, but they are still fooling around with Drive C:, D:, E: etc. If I need to reinstall the OS I end up with such a massive corruption of drivers I'm almost better off starting from scratch, but I'd lose all my installed programs, because Microsoft likes to keep them all in Program Files on the C: drive, where the OS resides. I can move my memory swap to another physical drive, to relieve some I/O burden, but it's not well known how to do this. Having application, operating system files, swap file and work files all on one disk is such a horrible idea, particularly without even the benefit of partitions (to protect some files or installed applications during a re-install)
I configured my first Linux box to have a tidy spot for the OS and its sources, not too much bigger than necessary (safety factor of 2). Put swap file on its own partition and installed all applications on a separate physical drive, with workspace for each on separate partitions. Flexible. I can change my harddisk configuration with a minimum of fuss. Try that with Windows.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Come on dude, we're talking about server systems here, not desktop unix which isn't exactly a "consumer" product.
Not even if somewhere around 10% of desktops and laptops are running Un*x? Heck, some of them are even running trademarked UNIX.