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The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-quite-over-the-hill dept.

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."

16 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Future by masternerdguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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    1. Re:Future by swanzilla · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      +1 Forth-sightful

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    2. Re:Future by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Funny

      Not the 32bit versions though. They wont make it past 2038.

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    3. Re:Future by gman003 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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 . . .

      64-bit Unix time will run out on December 4, precisely at 3:30:08 PM, 292,277,026,596 AD. It will be a Sunday.

      By then I fully expect computers will already have migrated well into the gigabytes-per-machine-word range, or will no longer be using bits as we know them. Either that, or we'll have encountered the heat death of the universe, so it will be irrelevant.

    4. Re:Future by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Is that a Sunday?

  2. UNIX family tree by HockeyPuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    Image from wikimedia of the UNIX Family Tree

    1. Re:UNIX family tree by the+linux+geek · · Score: 5, Informative

      And DG/UX, Reliant UNIX, Risc/os, SINIX, Unicos, Dynix, and about twenty other moderately successful moderate 90's UNIX systems. If you look closely, it's only showing systems that are either still alive or ancestors of systems that are still alive.

    2. Re:UNIX family tree by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's just the "Light" version.

      A more complete version is here:
      http://www.levenez.com/unix/

      Includes IRIX, Reliant, SINIX, Risc, Unicos, Dynix.

      And more fun stuff like iOS.

  3. I remember ... by versimilidude · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Not directly related to telephones? by cashman73 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:Not directly related to telephones? by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --

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  5. Read some of the original Bell System docs, too by Myself · · Score: 5, Informative

    Several issues of the Bell System Technical Journal tell the story of UNIX, in their own words. This one in particular is interesting.

    1. Re:Read some of the original Bell System docs, too by Myself · · Score: 5, Informative

      Here's the index of the July-August 1978 issue where the whole series of articles appears. Better format than the search above.

  6. Re:No support, no bug fixes by darkonc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

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  7. They actually got sued over the support. by darkonc · · Score: 5, Informative
    According to a friend of mine (who had a single-digit Unix license #), AT&T originally refused to release UNIX on the advice of their lawyers because the anti-trust agreement prevented them from getting into non-phone markets. The universities who wanted access to the, then fledgling, OS then sued them over a clause that prevented AT&T from suppressing technology. The universities won that battle.

    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.

    --
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  8. Re:user experience by DrSkwid · · Score: 5, Funny

    Unix is perfectly user friendly, it's just careful who it is friends with.

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