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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."
This is also why many people prefer Windows and Mac OSX. They want support and bug fixes.
I can see some form of UNIX making it to the 22nd century and beyond.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
since the old versions were known as Version 5, Version 7, and so on.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
For those few who are new here and don't know what RTFM means, read the RTFM!
Image from wikimedia of the UNIX Family Tree
The heydays ended ten years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_systems_used_on_top_500_supercomputers.svg
The culprit? Linux.
Sure wish Microsoft, who with the hindsight of Xenix, had adopted more *ix practices in Windows. I know some are there, but buried. Windows is such a pile of muck in a darkened room and when I first had my hands on an *ix system I fell in love with the simplicity and flexibility of it. Then there was Linux - build according to your needs, which utterly blew my mind. How long until we finally say Good-bye to non-*ix system architecture?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
note that the entire history of Unix is permeated with history of lawyer intervention and lawsuits, all thanks to the copyright and patent laws that exist because of government and that are enforced by government agencies and courts. This is just one more reason to abolish all patents and copyrights.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
I think it just the matter of habit. People are lazy and want everything on one click. If we were thought to use command line instead of clicking on the button, we would not have this problem.
Several issues of the Bell System Technical Journal tell the story of UNIX, in their own words. This one in particular is interesting.
I've never seen well-known Clearly. There future. EvEn The curtains flew this very moment, United States of others what to You all is to let Are you a NIGGER
Makes me wonder whether or not we'd be using as many Windows machines had the government allowed AT&T to sell and market Unix.
I've worked with Unix twice. The first time in 1996 and the second time from November 2011 to June of this year. It is as user unfriendly now as it was in 1996.
Makes me wonder whether or not we'd be using as many Windows machines had the government allowed AT&T to sell and market Unix.
We probably would. If ATT had been allowed to sell Unix, it almost certainly would have priced it way too high for IBM's taste.
Indeed, ATT tried selling a Unix-based personal computer (which, with typical former-Bell-System flair, they termed the "AT&T Unix PC") in the mid-80s, after they'd divested the local phone companies and could legally do whatever they wanted. It flopped, since it was obscenely priced at $5000, which was about twice the price of a fully-loaded DOS PC.
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.
And the recent attempts to merge with T-Mobile aren't enough to tell you why your statement is beyond reckless?
Makes me wonder whether or not we could even afford to pay for cellular service had the government allowed AT&T to circumvent government; regulation in the interest of the "user".
Seems like this sort of story always brings out the low number /.'ers. I remember one post in the last few years where each reply was by a lower post until someone showed up with a number under 1000. (If I remember right, lol. Memory is not my strong suit now. And the older I get, the less I can about that. lol)
While this was all happening, I was changing vacuum tubes in military crypto boxes. lol Hell, I remember my dad testing our TV's vacuum tubes at the A&P grocery store.
My first encounter with UNIX was learning it on a dialup system back in the days when CP/M was still the user operating system. It looked to me like a vast rolling trrainwreck that was continually evolved to keep it more or less functional. Teams of wizards surrounded it and made lots of money from its care and feeding. I became one of the wizards. But I still hated it. And do.
Come on dude, we're talking about server systems here, not desktop unix which isn't exactly a "consumer" product. FYI, only a handful of linux people actually want linux to "take over the desktop". The rest of us have already preferred it for 15 years.
'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.'
I8-D
Unless you are a major corporation and have a contract with Microsoft the only support you get is reinstall-reinstall-reinstall, with Open Source you get to contact the developers directly ...
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!''"
The article is well written but I am not sure they have checked their facts ... here is a direct quote from the article ....
"It even runs some supercomputers."
Now ... just head over to the TOP500 page (http://i.top500.org/stats) and sort by OS ..... I wouldn't call > 80 % just 'some supercomputers'
???
... if music be fruit of love, play on
Ironically MicroSoft's first saleable OS was a flavor of UNIX called Xenix. But Xenix on 80286's was really lame compared to UNIX on a PDP-11 or VAX. UNIX wasnt really that efficient on a PC until the 80486s in the mid-1990s. That was fortunately the same time Linus started his version. MicroSoft sold Xenix to SCO after it developed MS-DOS. SCO patent-trolled it unsuccessfully for many years.
Rubbish. Everyone knows the birthplace of Unix was in Jurassic Park.
The "first brood" of high level languages- COBOL, LISP and FORTRAN- are well into their 2nd half century. I would not be surprised if they last a century along with UNIX and C.
Sandusky?
No brain, no pain.
Nice piece. A bit incorrect about multiplexing as Burroughs had released the B-5500/5700 in 1966 that allowed multiple terminals and running the CANDE ( Command And Edit interface) allowed batch jobs and terminals to run simulatinously, unlike IBM computers of the day which were batch orietented for almost 10 years later.
the worth thing of this history is that it repeated again and again: some one in financial or marketing team cut founds for an intesting and inovating project, and some stupid technical guys works in their free time with discarted equipment, and ...
I work in the old Lucent and see this history may times in the last 10 years.
Heck, how'd that happen, after they lost their dangling participles?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I thought it was a Mach kernel and a BSD userland. How exactly that's quintessentially different from me installed Cygwin on my Windows machine and calling it a Unix machine is beyond me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx//arch.html
'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.'
No advertising?
And they're not really selling "Android" the operating system - Google does that; they sell/offer it to their customers, who are, in this case, phone (and tablet) manufacturers. AT&T are selling phones that run Android (just as they sell phones that run iOS and Windows Phone).
I don't know whether AT&T or the phone manufacturer would be the ones responsible for providing support and/or bug fixes in this case.
I have played with many flavours of Unix, Linux since '92 -- but the GUI is conflicted and never amounted to anything I will likely program. OS X is the best Unix that this old timer has used in my 23 years with the OS.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When companies stopped buying big iron proprietary RISC servers to put in their datacenters and started putting commodity x86 servers instead, UNIX stagnated. Linux which was seen as a toy prior took advantage of this.
I've never understood the difference b/w System# and Version# in Unix. What does SVR4 mean? What would trigger a change from System III to System V, and what happened to System IV in b/w? If you have releases, why have decimal releases, like SVR3.2, SVR4.2? SCO's Unixware 7.x was supposed to be SVR5. (Oh, and why are System# Roman numerals and Version# Hindu numerals? (I'm not going to call it Arabic, since the Arabs had nothing to do w/ their invention)) How come nobody else, e.g. Sun, thought of coming out w/ an SVR5 Unix?
On a different note, since Open Group owns the trademark and the certification of what's Unix, is there still anything (other than SCO's moribund appeals) preventing SVR4.x and BSD to merge back into a single Unix? Also, aside from DEC, did Open Group retire OSF/1 after the merger of OSF and SVID? Also, if Unixware is a trademark of the Open Group, what exactly is its definition - Unix plus some sort of Netware?
For the current market, is it valid to think of BSD as the only active Unix out there? Yeah, I know Solaris, HP/UX & AIX are still around, but they are all largely platform specific (and if Itanium dies, I think so will HP/UX). Incidentally, anyone know whether if BSD & Linux were subjected to the Open Group's certification tests, they'd both be certified as Unix, just like OS-X is?
But does two hours of pushing broom get an 8 x12 4 bit room?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."