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

I remember ...

[versimilidude]

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.

Re:I remember ...

[Guy Harris]

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)

As I remember, and as the "SETTING UP UNIX - Sixth Edition" document says (see the start *roff document in this V6 documentation tarball - yes, I know, tarballs are an anachronism here :-)), V6 came in a binary distribution that you read from a 9-track tape onto a disk:

If you are set up to do it, it might be a good idea immediately to make a copy of the disk or tape to guard against disaster. The tape contains 12100 512-byte records followed by a single file mark; only the first 4000 512-byte blocks on the disk are significant.

The system as distributed corresponds to three fairly full RK packs. The first contains the binary version of all programs, and the source for the operating system itself; the second contains all remaining source programs; the third contains manuals intended to be printed using the formatting programs roff or nroff. The `binary' disk is enough to run the system, but you will almost certainly want to modify some source programs.

You didn't have to recompile anything (at least not if you had more than 64KB; I had to do some hackery with the assembler to get it to run on a 64KB machine, as there wasn't enough memory to run the C compiler - I had to stub out the pipe code with an assembler-language replacement for pipe.c, and then recompile the kernel with a smaller buffer cache and the regular pipe code). Most users probably either had to or had good reasons to recompile the kernel (different peripherals, more memory for the buffer cache - or less memory in my case, so I had to shrink it from 8 whole disk blocks to 6 - etc.), and if you weren't in the US eastern time zone or didn't have daylight savings time you had to change ctime.c, or whatever it was called, in the C library for your time zone, recompile the C library, and then rebuild all utilities with the new C library (no Olson code and database, no shared libraries, no environment variables so no TZ environment variable).

Re:No support, no bug fixes

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:No support, no bug fixes

[toadlife]

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

The conditions that led to UNIX...

[freality]

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!''"

Re:No support, no bug fixes

[kiwimate]

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...)

Re:No support, no bug fixes

[grub]

Apple is the largest UNIX vendor in the world right now...