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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.
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Image from wikimedia of the UNIX Family Tree
"in 2008 Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which affected some versions that were released in 2001"
i rest my case
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.
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.
Several issues of the Bell System Technical Journal tell the story of UNIX, in their own words. This one in particular is interesting.
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...
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.
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
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
Unix is perfectly user friendly, it's just careful who it is friends with.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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!''"
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.
Apple is the largest UNIX vendor in the world right now...
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