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."

Comments

Future

[masternerdguy]

I can see some form of UNIX making it to the 22nd century and beyond.

Re:Future

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Just before 2038, there will be tons of hype about "The End of the Epoch!", just like "Happy New Year 2000! Nothing works anymore!" Plenty of work for onery, old C programmers like me, with lawns to get off of.

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 . . .

Re:No support, no bug fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

"in 2008 Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which affected some versions that were released in 2001"
i rest my case

Not directly related to telephones?

[cashman73]

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.

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.

Re:Not directly related to telephones?

[ackthpt]

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.

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.

Also at the heart of OS X. One of the smartest moves by Apple and Jobs, replacing the hideous old Mac OS with something built on Mach and borrowing heavily from BSD. Apple made the painful leap and it paid off handsomely.

Re:The heydays ended ten years ago

[the linux geek]

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.

Re:No support, no bug fixes

[darkonc]

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".

Re:The most intelligent OS I've ever seen

[jeremiahstanley]

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.

Re:The heydays ended ten years ago

[DesScorp]

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.