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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.
"in 2008 Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which affected some versions that were released in 2001"
i rest my case
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.
Top500 is basically irrelevant as a model of the server industry as a whole. UNIX is still kickin' on scale-up commercial servers and doing pretty well at it.
No, some gamers don't prefer Windows, they just boot it as a second OS to play.
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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.
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.
Hire me...
[smacks G3ckoG33k with a wrench, and drags him into another room]
Look here, we have something to explain to you.. Unix spawned many variations.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Unix_history-simple.svg
All were similar in concept, but had their own ways of doing things. As this branched away from a common path, most groups agreed on a common set of rules, known as POSIX.
Once you've learned how one Unix-like environment works, you can use them all. You will find that a Linux server, an Android phone, a TiVo DVR, and even an Apple desktop, all operate in very similar ways, although each has its quirks.
The outstanding rogue operating system now is Windows. They too have recognized that they are missing out by remaining completely non-compliant, and have begun incorporating various aspects of POSIX as add-on (SFU or SUA) and 3rd party (Cygwin) packages.
The chart you displayed should have had the "Unix" name divided between major and minor groups. Major being operating systems such as Linux. Minor elements combined in as "Other Unix" and "Other OS". In that, "Windows" having such a minor share, should have only been labeled "Other OS".
In November 1993, Cray, Inc accounted for 40% all systems in the graph, and the largest share of the "Unix" segment. It would have been a mixture of UNICOS, COS, and Solaris. "Unix" as a specific OS only accounted for 15%. Even those were simply the OS name provided for the list, as an indication of a Unix-like operating system, not that it was actually "Unix".
Now get back out there, and don't make me hit you with a wrench again.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The heydays ended ten years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_systems_used_on_top_500_supercomputers.svg
The culprit? Linux.
Linux is Unix. Even if it's not certified as such. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc. People started using Linux in the first place because they wanted "a Unix" for personal use. Linux is just a clone of Unix. In the end, it's not really all that different from "Unix proper" than the various flavors of licensed Unix are from each other. I'd argue that most Linux systems are a good deal closer to, say, Solaris, than OS X is... an officially certified Unix.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You sound like a Mac user that's content to use a very limited definition of what constitutes Unix in order to brag and create misleading ads.
Those of us that actually use multiple Unixen on a daily basis and have done so for decades have a more complete picture of what a Unix is.
The "several other things" are kind of important on a day to day basis.
Linux is much more compliant as a Unix than MacOS is in this regard.
Go play with your pretty pictures and stop trying to lecture real Unix users.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Those of us that actually use multiple Unixen on a daily basis and have done so for decades have a more complete picture of what a Unix is.
And those of us who actually develop for multiple Unixes have to deal with all their quirks, and don't always find Mac OS X the quirkiest.
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.