Slashdot Mirror
The Top UNIX Moments of the Century
jyang writes " Performance Computing has this December article: 'The world might seem to run on UNIX, but it wasn't always so.
Readers opine on the best moments of everyone's favorite OS.'" Well, among all those "end of the century" lists, we finally found a worthwhile one. ;-)
Where can I get a tarball for Netscape?
-- $SIGNATURE
greatest moments in Unix history??? come on! I might have to bash some of you geeks... just keep your shotguns at bay, and leave the the white makeup and black coats at home.
Where's K&R C?
Man, you been living in a box lately or what? :) Go to http://www.mozilla.org...
I was surprised not to see K&R C on the list (they mentioned when Ken Thompson's mom met his dad though) although I thought it was pretty complete. The fact that mentioned the change from ^ to | as pipe impressed the hell out of me.
It also makes you think about Richard Stallman's contribution to computing to see that like 5 things on the list are his direct doing.
Is it just me or was the following entry missing:
* Linus Torvalds uploads the linux kernel
I mean really, that's a given!
bakes
--
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
technically, you can't. since the tarball at Mozilla.org is for MOZILLA.
--
rJames.org - illustration
1. The CLI (command language interpreter) was a separate, user-mode program that could be easily replaced. I was used to DEC operating systems where the CLI was an integral part of the operating system, sort of like the baby alien that attachs to your face in the movie Alien. It couldn't be removed without major surgery on the OS and its tentacles were firmly embedded in the kernel.
2. The shell didn't hardwire the command set like most CLIs of the day. You didn't have to modify the shell to add new commands, just write a new user-mode program. The shell was light on command line policy, leaving most things up to the interpretation of the user program.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Research Unix Edition 7 was released in 1978, and included:
- The Bourne Shell, the first shell that was a programming language in its own right.
- Environment variables (this was an OS enhancement, not just the shell features supporting it).
- UUCP--the Unix/Unix Copy Program. This brought networking, email, and (a bit later) news to the masses. This feature literally changed the world.
- File systems larger than 32MB. Unix was no longer a toy.
- Lint, along with system sources that actually passed it (no more "register *p" for generic pointers everywhere). C was forever improved by this step, since many people learned to program in it from reading kernel sources (just like Linux programmers do today).
- 32V, the port to the VAX--this was the ancestor of 3.x and 4.x BSD. (The 2.x BSD's ran on PDP-11's, and for a time were developed in parallel.)
- And so on...
This was the version that got Unix started at many Universities. It was also the last version of Research Unix to make it out of Bell Labs into general distribution for research and educational use. One can only wonder what we would have seen had AT&T not decided to squeeze money out of it, locking away further Research Editions.is when i istalled it on my machine!!
The day Microsoft got out of the OS arena...
Ahh, that takes me back.. or is it forwards? With time travel you never can tell.
Apollywoggies to the Doctor...
That's right, you can't get a tarball of Netscape, since they're not software, they're a division of AOL. Technically, you are correct. BTW, regardless of what it's marketed as, "Netscape Navigator" has always been Mozilla.
"The announcement of the Hamilton Group, which begat OS/F, which killed UNIX's viability as a commercial desktop"
Ok, call me a dunce.. but what is the Hamilton group, and when did they make this announcement?
Funny, i kinda thought that *I* was running UNIX on my desktop.
--
rJames.org - illustration
I fail to see why this is a top moment in Unix history. If anything, this is a downfall, as as far as I'm concerned, the last thing we need running on unix platforms is Microsoft software.
Netscape's introduction of an integrated mail, news, and browser application
I can't say I'm too much of a fan of this one either, at least not the way it's implemented. While I use Communicator for browsing and Mail under RH6.1, I hate the fact that whenever one function (mail or browser) locks up/crashes, the other does too. I think you could have the two as separate applications that were still tightly integrated.
I know. Originally, when NSCP/AOL was still Mosiac, they were trying to find out what to call the new Unix client that they were developing. JWZ prompted 'Mozilla'.. and the rest is history.
But!.. leave it up to marketing shmo-heads to screw everything up.
You can't get a tarball of Navigator or communnicator as far as i know...
--
rJames.org - illustration
AT&T SVR4 and the Amiga?! 1991: The release of SystemVR4 was a major stage in the growth of UNIX. But a little-known fact about the start of this industry paradigm shift was that the very first platform to receive the AT&T port of this innovative and powerfully stable pillar of UNIX was the Commodore Amiga3000(UX)!
:)
I can't beleive it - I can't beleive it!
Someone *does* remember this - it's amazing
I still remember the day when all those crappy newspapers called the A3000UX a 'miss of the decade'. Like "Who is going to use UNIX anyway?!". Indeed, it didn't make a lot of success, but Amiga was *always* way ahead of its time.
Amazing how many of them mention free software and the FSF. I mean, GNU is not UNIX, right?
What about the night that Bill Joy wrote first versions of a large portion of the unix network utilites.
We've got almost 40 years until the end of time as we know it. (or until 64-bit Unix, whichever comes first.)
:)
:), having different widget sets and window managers available, or having a free compiler and a useful toolset...
However... kudos to BSD for developing Unix to what we have today, and the same to the Linux community, for continuing to develop it, and spread the gospel.
I think I'm continually impressed with how Unix takes a more open and general approach to everything, and makes life easier in the end.
Like how directories and even hardware devices are files, networking transparency is inherent in X (even if it took me a while to figure that out
Truly, if I hadn't found Unix, I would have been doomed to reinvent it. Probably starting with DOS. Ewww....
---
pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I just don't understand why everything has to be written in C. Why don't they write a Fortran based OS ? Surely with Fortran's superior mathematical operations it would kill C-written UNIX. Someone should rewrite UNIX in FORTRAN.
..that the work done by the FSF to construct GNU and further the efforts of free software didn't inadvertantly help Unix at the same time. Many Unices use GNU software packages. I can barely remember the last time I used a Korn, C, or plain old Bourne shell (not that there aren't others that aren't GPL'ed).
Those were great moments for both GNU and Unix, strange as that may sound.
~ Kish
Why recreate Unix? Unix is a monster because of a New Jersey mentality and of course because it's a C derivative, too.
Unix workstations could be called `C machines', in the same way as LispMs.
But I don't think it would make much sense having FORTRAN machines, except where you get bitten by the bugs on your C-based system.
If I remember correctly, there was FORTRAN for Symbolics lispms, but I don't know how friendly it was for calling Lisp routines from FORTRAN. There was indeed a C compiler, and X11 (but no Motif. You can use Motif from Lisp via a CLM server running on a Unix workstation).
BTW, Lisp is the only language besides C that has its own native X library (the equivalent of Xlib).
It's way nicer, of course, having all that macro machinery at your disposal.
If you need compatibility with C widget sets, you don't go through it, you use the C Xlib (directly and/or indirectly via Xt, GTK, etc.)
(1) Creation and adoption of x10 window software
(2) PCC, the portable C compiler
(3) Berkeley networking
Don't know precise events to attach to each, but all seem to have significant impact.
A few other people find it useful. ;-)
We all know Gnu's Not Unix and neither is Linux, but come on, that's just a little fun with the lawyers. Unix wouldnt be unix without GNU tools and for most intents and purposes, Linux is close enuf.
:) Their skillsets apply with next to no learning curve.
There are old school Unix people who are reluctant to let a Linux box into their server room. The best thing that can be done to win these people over is to point out that legalisms aside, GNU/Linux IS Unix.
It is not amazingly surprising to see Richard Stallman feature so prominently on this list. Not because he has done so much for UN*X (or so little, for that matter), but because People Know Richard Stallman. They know his name, he has featured prominently in the media in the last couple of years, and projects his name is (still) attached to are doing well.
As to his contribution to UN*X? I have no idea. I'm a newcomer to the wonderful world of SunOS, HP-UX, Solaris, *BSD and linux, I did my first man man in '93, I had my first root in '96, and I feel a lot of the Big Things In UN*X (tm) happened before my time.
I think it is a fundamental thing with these kind of lists that they pretty much always overvalue recent contributions/songs/films/ice-cream flavours, at the expense of older ones. A lot of people only catch on later, and will not remember the first tottering steps, the first breakthroughs, because they simply weren't there yet. They will go for the more recent accomplishments, the things they *did* witness.
So, lists like this are fun, and interesting, but I have my doubts as to their value for actually determining the impact that developments have had, the relative importance of UN*X moments.
Jos "numbers, I want numbers!" D.
I'd say, in general, that most of the work done at UCB contributed more to the success of Unix than anything else. Without UCB, Unix would have probably remained in the dark ages. They gave us networking, vi, csh, and perhaps most importantly, an open source development model, which allowed Unix to become widespread.
PS. Sure, csh syntax may suck, but without it, we'd all be using Bourne shell. csh gave us command histories, brace expansion, and numerous other goodies that we take for granted today. Without csh, other shells (ksh, bash, zsh) would be very different, if they existed at all.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
There are just too many to make it a good sample, but the above were darned fine moments.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
ought to be on the list. Read about it here.
Spot-on. And I'm convinced that the Mozilla project has been trying to live down the big disappointment most people felt about that. Not only couldn't folks download the source for the Navigator/Communicator they used every day, they couldn't even compile a beta-quality browser. What a complete bummer.
Another one missing in the list. The world uses more chars than you'll find in 7-bit ASCII.
:-)
That paved the way for Unix to the non-US world (it's out there somewhere you know
-- From Denmark
I think sun rpc deseves to be on the list. It is what enabled cliend server computing as was very popular just a couple of years ago. geach
What is the story behind this?
I didn't know tannenbaum was so closely tied to the origins of open source. His book "Modern Operating Systems" is what got me into programming. He must write good books.
Linux may not be Unix, but you have to admit that it is significant to Unix, so should be mentioned prominently in this list.
Oh, yes. I wasn't trying to put Linux down, I was just trying to explain the difference as best I know it. As far as my personal opinion goes, Linux should be near the top of that list. While Linux is an interesting OS, it hasn't really contributed that much to UNIX directly. Indirectly it has launched innumerable geeks into the UNIX world, steered scores of programmers to write UNIX apps, and most importantly is the first UNIX variant to achieve household name status. While the vast majority of computer users still haven't ever seen Linux, they know the name. What other UNIX variant can you say that about?
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
its multics not multix unix was spelled unics in the begining. one unix two unicses not two unixes as some ppl spell it
As the AC above noted, C's default assuptions about pointer aliasing make certain classes of programs run like crap. The new restrict keyword is a huge step in the right direction, but it's still a Band-Aid.
Why are sane pointer aliasing conventions important in the language? Well, since effecient code generation is something nearly everyone lusts after, compiler writers spend alot of effort "optimizing" code. Since C doesn't provide much of a mechanism for describing where pointers point, the compiler has to implement alot of guesswork. If it's not sure, it punts and outputs slow code.
The problem is that these optimizations are hard to get right. Notice how GCC 2.95 broke the Linux kernel, unless you compiled with the new alias analysis turned off. It would be better for the language to have saner pointer semantics.
Note that this wasn't so much of a problem in the beginning when pipelines were short and issue-widths were narrow. Nowadays, though, pointer aliasing issues are one of the biggest issues preventing code from going faster. (I know, I hit these issues regularly.) I welcome restrict with open arms.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Ok, I still have mixed feelings about it myself, but what about Solaris 2?
/. either!
And let's not forget
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The lp1 on fire bit wasn't in the docs, was it?
BTW, who remembers the rest of the tunefs joke? (Namely, the bits that were in the actual nroff source for the man page?)
From what I recall, the man page's source said something along the lines of "Remove this, and a Unix daemon will dog your steps until the time_t's wrap around." I unfortunately do not have access to a system with the original quote that I know of offhand. Anyone?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
"* Netscape's introduction of an integrated mail, news, and browser application"
:-)
Lucid Emacs (jwz's previous project) did all that and, err, edited text files, etc,etc,etc,etc,etc first!
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
NT is based on the premise that anyone who can manipulate a mouse can administer a system. Huh?!?
They have emacs and Netscape on there, but not Linux. Obviously this was written by Bill Joy.
Linux may not be an official Unix, but it is good for Unix. That alone makes it an important event in Unix history.
It's important in the same way IBM PC clones were important to IBM. They weren't IBM PCs, but the fact that they were compatible and completely changed IBM's impact on the world was fairly relevant. Linux seems to be having a similar effect with respect to Unix.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
That those aren't necessarily big contributions to Unix (tm) (although people will no doubt disagree about their relative merit). They are, however, "famous". The list really only includes "famous" things rather than "important" things. And Stallman is "famous" so his contributions will show up disproportionately more often than other people who also made (perhaps more important) contributions.
Notice that it is "Stallman invents GPL" and "Stallman founds FSF" (admittedly other accomplishments of his left the attribution off). I was under the impression that he had a lawyer help him write the GPL and other people were involved in the founding of the FSF. However, no names are mentioned when it comes to talking about the TCP/IP stack, pipes, sendmail, or "everything is a file". Is the GPL really more important to "Unix" than TCP/IP, pipes, and "everything is a file"?
Anyways, here's a few moments that I'd regard as being significant (irrespective of whether they're in anyone else's list or not). They are not in any specific order - date, importance, etc. It's just the order I wrote them in.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Fortran "should" be dead? not by a long shot. No, Fortran (not FORTAN anymore, btw) is not the language to use for everything. Even though Prime did it, it is not a good choice for writing an OS.
But when it comes time to due high level number crunching (or beyond that, merely bashing them into submission), Fortran has no peer--nothing even close.
Yes, you can usually tune c to give similar performance. But by the time you're done tuning, I've already used the Fortran code, and am on to the next project--or the one afterwards.
Fortan does not inlcude large portions of what c contains--which is what allows it to make assumpitons and optimizations that would be disastrous in c. It is also much faster to write (especially with F90 free-format), and easier for an "outsider" to read. (but then, there's no language yet built which is proof against crummy coding)
I hate to think of how much longer the dynamic programming project for my dissertation would have takein in c than Fortran *shudder*.
Mozilla will be released about a month after the first service pack for Windows 2000. In other words real soon now.
The first public information on Unix (other than printing the troff files from the distribution tapes) was the Unix issue (July-August 1978) of the Bell System Technical Journal. Thompson & Ritchie had an article on the kernel, I think there were articles on the compiler, the shell (Mashey or Bourne?), ed, and nroff/troff.
This issue holds the distinction of being the most-stolen magazine in AT&T/Lucent/Telecordia technical libraries.
The "Bell System" was AT&T, including Western Electric (now Lucent, more or less), the "baby Bells" (now Bell Atlantic et. al.), and Bell Telephone Laboratories (now AT&T Labs, Bell Labs, and Telecordia). It was broken up when AT&T "divested" the local operating companies in 1984.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Glad you mention Larry's name. I'm actually surprised I read all the way through this forum and only found one person mentioning that glaring ommission.
:)
The other name that should have been included in the article was Zawinski. Where would we be today without jwz?
I loved this line.
New with this release:
All known bugs fixed. New bugs added.
George
I've never had so much fun as when I first started programming, in FORTRAN of course. Since then I've tried C, C++, VB (Bollocks), Java, a couple of 4GLs. The only one that didn't leave me with a hollow feeling inside was FORTH - it was a bit too structured for my liking, but it had possibilities nonetheless, especially the arithmetic operators. But nothing can bring back those early FORTRAN days (and nights).
I also propose the banning of the tabs key and the parentheses keys for all languages - there should be no need for block indentation of code and cheating with operator precedence.
(This has been posted before, but I can't resist....)
/bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti)
Subject: The True Path (long)
Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, C-h for help and "foo" File is read only. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
``Ed is the standard text editor.''
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
``Ed is the standard text editor.''
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem> ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
``Ed is the standard text editor.''
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a ``viitor.'' Not a ``emacsitor.'' Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their ``edlin'' on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can remember what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED ``VISUAL'' EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
?
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I carefully copied that son of gun page by page because the "master" I got was already so blurry I could barely read it. I finally threw it out when Linux came out because that came with source. You can buy the Lion's book fresh off the commercial press now.
1) The day they stopped bundling the "C" compiler for free.
2) Bill Gates buys SCO and sabotages cheap Unix.
3) Windows 3.0 ships
4) Trying to kill -9 the man pages.
Got any more?
..I'm confused. What are you talking about?
K&R is a reference to the highly acclaimed book, The C Programming Language. It is also known as the Old Testament. The second edition of the book, which covers the ANSI standard, is known as the New Testament (or K&R 2).
Hope this clears up any confusion.
~ Kish
This is not strictly true. Some of the original System V licensees (Sun and SGI, at least) bought out the license for a large one off payment, when it was still owned by Novell, IIRC. As such, they no longer pay SCO royalties.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Write you O/S in PASCAL!!! Hewlett-Packard wrote MPE/XL (MPE/iX) for the PA-RISC-based 3000's in HP-ModCal (a pascal/modula variant with system extensions).
You used to have to crank up fsck by hand after a panic. Any moron could now reboot the machine.
The fact that the Amiga's OS was based on UN*X. There was also another manual with "joking" comments in it. The Amiga 2000 manual had the schematics in the back. Someone had written funny comments in the corner of the diagrams. That related to the specific functions of the different chipsets. I don't have my 2000's manual, but I vaguely remember something about a rock and roll heart on the diagram for the sound chipset :)
It is spelled Tanenbaum, not Tannenbaum!
The first step in driving away the newbies is for programmers to add every bit of information into the RPM name that they can, while keeping "Copy" and "Paste" out of the Xterminal. Here is an example of what we should be shooting for.
9 934.e-394-l4949.l-p.rpm
widget-1134.3659-v8u2.s-d-9-3-3-nv.h98344111-232.
If the names keep getting longer, nobody will want to type them in! If we don't do something soon, we risk having easy to read names like:
widget-1.0.rpm
This cannot be allowed to happen! It would be the end of the world if things actually made sense! The user must be required to type in meaningless crap like this at least 50 times before they can actually do something useful! There must be more information than anyone would ever care to know or possibly understand!
If they make a mistake, let them start over from the beginning! Muahahahhaha!
If they dare complain, tell them that they have the choice of any color text or font that they like, and important features like that make the terminal much better and more useful than crapy 'Mac-Speak' features like "Copy" and "Paste".
You might want to moderate down the Lisp advocacy that follows this sentence. :)
To read about the "New Jersey" mentality, you want to do a search for Gabriel's paper on Lisp (I think it's called "Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big"). A keyword search for "Gabriel Worse is Better" should turn up the correct paper. (The term "New Jersey" is also documented in the Jargon file.) Basically, the New Jersey mentality is characterized by "simplicity at the expence of correctness, completeness, and elegance". The previous poster called UNIX a "monster" because it is designed improperly, with all sorts of silly kludges to get it around arbitrary limits (e.g. number of file descripters per process, length of a file name, etc.) or simplistic solutions to hard problems (e.g. the "pc-lusering " interrupt problem described below). Languages like C/C++ have some truly awful kludges in them because they lack garbage collection, or a good exceptions mechanism, etc. Sure, C is really simple, and yeah, UNIX and its attendant scripts and shells and whatnot are really easy to use---but there's a lot of stupid things in there that shouldn't be.
The canonical example of the "New Jersey approach to design" (given in Gabriel's paper) is of interrupt handling. If a hardware interrupt occurs while a program is in kernel mode (i.e. the program made a system call), the right thing to do is to back the program back out to just before the system call, handle the interrupt, then retry the system call automatically. Instead, UNIX aborts the system call and returns an error to the program (EAGAIN). The program must test for this error and explicitly retry the operation.
The other poster described "C machines", so I won't go over that again.
I do want to address two more of your comments, "C is a very general, low level language" and "it is more easily translated into machine code than Lisp". While I agree with you that C is a low-level language, I'd have to take issue with your use of the adjective "general". I don't think C is a general-purpose language any more than I think IA32 or SPARC assembly language is "general purpose". C excels at being a portable assembly language, but I doubt it is appropriate for large projects (but that's just my oh-so-humble opinion).
As far as your assertion that C "is more easily translated into machine code than Lisp", I would also have to disagree. Certainly there are computers more amenable to Lisp (e.g. the SPARC with hardware support for pointer tagging), but that doesn't automatically mean Lisp is going to be slower than C on some random computer. In fact, CMU Common Lisp (a free Lisp that runs under UNIX) generates codes that run as fast as comparable C programs. Check out Martin Cracauer's floating point benchmarks in CMU CL and C.
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
If you want to be pedantic, "Netscape" was the name of the company, and "Navigator" and "Communicator" were the actual products you're thinking of.
So the statement "Netscape switched to the open-source model", makes sense - in that the COMPANY switched to the open source model (at least for their web-browser products).
Asking "where can I get a tarball for Netscape?" is like asking "where can I get a tarball for IBM? (or any other company-name)"
You're giving more credit here than is really due. If I were going to give a "father of the open source OS" to something it would be the original Bell Labs UNIXen. They basically gave it away for a song for years, and BSD wouldn't have ever happened if that weren't the case.
But BSD was seminal in that it provided fertile soil for the development of a whole lot of software that was distributed in source form, often at little or no cost. And perhaps the most important of that software was the TCP/IP implementation -- it formed the foundation on which today's Internet is built.
I'd give credit to the Bell Labs folk in one other area too. The OS they built was simple enough to be cloned, and that led to a wealth of reimplementations including Xinu, MINIX, and of course Linux. And those formed the foundations of today's open source movement.
The advent of MACH, allowing people to see how different OS philosophies work.
Mach wasn't really that interesting. Its core ideas had been well hashed out some fifteen years earlier. If anything I might consider Mach something of a failure; it was, after all, the basis of NeXT and OSF -- both huge failures.
The advent of K&R C, which made programming much easier, whilst retaining a lot of power.
C was following in the footsteps of PL/I. What made C particularly interesting was not its power but its simplicity; it was easy to learn and easy to implement and cheap to license. All of these things kickstarted its spread.
Lest we give C too much credit let us not forget that C also overloaded the concept of reference, pointer, and array as well as providing very little in the way of inter-function consistency checking. These things led to a whole host of bugs that continue to plague us (although at least ANSI gave us function parameter checking).
The advent of X10, providing a networkable GUI to the real-world workstation.
While the general idea is good, neither X10 nor X11 are particularly good designs. Sun's NeWS (yet another Gosling brainchild) was vastly superior in design. Too bad the implementation was so bad (something you could say about a lot of Gosling stuff, actually).
Where X failed was in its association with DEC. DEC wanted a really limited functionality desktop (they sold servers don't you know) and that resulted in serious overuse of network bandwidth and a whole host of warts in the protocol. The one thing that could really have improved X was display lists (rendering macros, if you will), which would have reduced network overhead by at least an order of magnitude for typical applications.
But good ideas just won't stay down. Sun failed with NeWS but we got the functionality a few years later anyway -- only now we call it a web browser.
An interesting sidebar to all of this is that DEC's idea of a graphics terminal failed miserably in the face of ever faster and less expensive desktop equipment. And yet we have companies like Sun and Oracle trying to foist the same old stuff on us a decade later.
The creation of Perl, which revolutionised the concept of scripts.
Well, you got me confused with this one. Perl is certainly popular but to say it revolutionized scripting -- well, that's pushing things a bit. Technologically there was nothing new there. What made it particularly interesting was Wall's trademark portability and source distribution.
And that leads us naturally to:
The development of Sun's RPC system, making the development of distributed software practical.
Sun's RPC wasn't revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination; this stuff had been done long before. What was revolutionary was what Sun did with it -- they gave it away, along with NFS. In short order any machine you had could be an NFS server and Sun sold the only fully integrated clients. Now that was smart! It gave them a serious leg-up on the fully proprietary Domain.
We see the pattern of "cheap source availability wins" repeated again and again throughout the history of computing. UNIX was hugely successful because source code was cheap. (In fact, the darkest days of UNIX can be traced directly to AT&T's change in the pricing model.) TCP/IP exploded because its source code was cheap. RPC/NFS was successful because source code was cheap. The FSF tools have propagated widely because source code was cheap. Linux is exploding because source code is cheap. BSD has made a comeback since its source code got cheap again.
Sun's idea that they could make money while effectively giving the source away was revolutionary. Too bad they went the proprietary route after beating Apollo into submission.
The development of Gopher and WAIS, introducing distributed information services, distributed hypertext, and distributed multimedia. The WWW built on these concepts, but did not create them.
Hypertext finds its source in Xanadu, which predates the rest of these considerably. Xanadu was quite revolutionary concept and it spawned a wealth of projects to build distributed document systems.
But while Xanadu gave us the concepts it was the Mosaic team that made it not only practical but attractive. And that turned the world on its head.
The writing of TWM - a window manager SO horrible as to actually encourage people to go out and write something better.
Heh, clearly you don't remember uwm. Twm was a vast improvement.
Anyway, while I don't agree with most of your opinions, you certainly did hit on several important themes.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
/* You are not expected to understand this */
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I remember TECO with a great deal of fondness. With what other editor could you spend more time on life games, renumbering utilities, and gray-code searches than manipulating text?
:)
There was even a macro VEDIT, for those times you just wanted visual editing with arrow keys and all. It was conveniently distributed without any format characters and provided weeks of fun just figuring out how it worked.
I'm far more productive with Brief/Crisp but I've never had as much fun with an editor since TECO. It could really trash a file from the simplest typos!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Back in about 1977 I heard about John Lion Commentary on the V6 kernel. He had given out copies an Australian(?) Usenix conference. Then ATT (or was it Western Electric) got *involved*.
I actually did the paperwork, got an academic license and sent in the money. This was, I think, $50. I had to pay this twice since they ignored me the first time. Mind you, I was making about $4/hr. in a school computer lab and paying rent. I wanted the Commentary real, real bad.
Finally, they sent it and I xeroxed the hell out of it. But I've always kept the original. Maybe
I'll put it on EBay. Actually, I lent it to one of the BSD crowd. It was entered as evidence in the Berkeley ATT court case, so I'm told. He xeroxed it, and then he sent it back.
Six of us at school used it for an OS course, a real OS course. We got v7, I wrote a boot block and a disk driver and we got it up and running on the department PDP 11/60.
Lions later wrote a Commentary on the C compiler and I had a copy of it. Lost it.
Whoever did the Apache Commentary should have studied the structure of the Lions Commentary closely. The cross reference was invaluable. It actually used a couple of files to quickly teach C. It gave a good overview of the structure of the operating system. It was a teaching vehicle.
Oh yeah, "you are not expected to understand" this is my favorite comment. And Lions does explain it.
Solaris, obviously. The userland apps are generally 32 bit (for space efficiency), but the kernel is 64bit.
:)
HP-UX. Those PA-RISC machines are 64bit, right?
IRIX runs on 64bit MIPS chips.
For that matter, several BSDs are truly Unices, and run on some 64bit platforms. NetBSD runs on all of these, right? FreeBSD runs on several of them, and I think even Open has one or two (verification?).
And of course, everyone's favortie 64bit Unix-alike, Linux, which runs on all of the above
Actually, there's a century ending every second. And hopefully, you'll be dead by the time this one ends.
Frustrating for him, maybe, but I'm sure it was even more frustrating for the typist. I've met RMS. He's not exactly a patient man. Brilliant visionary, to be sure, but not particularly forgiving if you're not blasting along at the same speed and direction of thought as he is.
--
A host is a host from coast to coast...
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
How can you forget AFS and Coda which allow terrabytes of distributed storage? Surely if NFS was recognized, AFS should be too.
I think it was in 1983 that I got my own first one. Space-age looking design, one of the better keyboards ever made, A useful desktop, and AT&T Unix SVR2 which did lots of useful things in 2MB. Later on, expandable to 3.5MB, and a 67MB hard drive.
Later on, SVR2.3, with a useful C-compiler (could use it to prepare GCC and emacs. The box kept appearing in movies and TV shows, and eventually seemed to be marketed as the center of PABX systems.
2 of mine are still in regular use by friends, although their real motivation to get them from me were those many shelf-feet of the red AT&T manuals.
Microsoft recognized the value of UNIX more than 20 years ago and purchased a source license to UNIX with the intention of porting it to home computers. They hired a bunch a UNIX programmers and set out to bring UNIX to the home computer desktop. They did this even before the big contract with IBM for MS-DOS.
The version 1.0 of MS-DOS was really GazelleDOS and it very closely emulated CP/M, with a flat file system. It was only designed to fill the gap until CP/M-86 came out. After that fateful put-down by Digital Research and IBM's approach to Microsoft, and Microsoft's subsequent purchase of all rights to GazelleDOS, this primitive OS was turned over to the UNIX programmers.
They added many of the features that UNIX folks have come to take for granted. They added hierarchal file systems, command line redirection, etc. etc. They won on every single design concept except the slash vs backslash. Supposedly, there was a major client who used the slash for parameter deliniation.
But, the effects of the UNIX programmers profoundly changed MS-DOS. I was working in a situation where my client had source licenses to both Ms_DOS v1 and v2. The difference what huge. Since I was doing UNIX programming for other clients, I immediately recognized the change and the potential impact.
Once MS-DOS became a cash cow, the Xenix project went to the back burner. There were already companies signed up by Microsoft to have exclusive rights for a processor family for Xenix.
SCO is the one everyone remembers, but there were others for other processor families. There were many others that provided Xenix for 68000, z8000, 3b2, and other processor.
SCO is the one that survived. It eventually bought out MS's interest and became independant.
But the fact remains that Msoft purchased a source license for UNIX 20 years ago and tried to create a commercial product from it. The UNIX influence shaped much of the Microsoft products for years.
Msoft did thier best, but they could not muster support for Xenix without marketing support. By then, all marketing support would have to be focussed on the products that were making money for them -- MS-DOS.
MS sold their interest in SCO, because it was in competion with some of their products.
But, let's give them credit where credit is due. Microft put some good programmers to fixing the problems with MD-DOS v1.
SCO would not exist, if it were not for Msoft.
what are you saying? un*x sucks? since its not "new era open source buzzword-filled crap?"
please call me when I can run an open source OS on my Sun E10k's.
not to flame, but...get real! open source software is great, but it does not shadow our "old era" stuff just yet (maybe it does in *your* little world).
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
But Mastering Regular Expressions credited Ken Thompson with the original version of grep, circa 1968.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
This list was interesting, albeit incomplete (but any such list would be, of course). One point I really, really disagree with:
- The day Microsoft ported Internet Explorer to Solaris.
Was this person on crack, or what? I'll admit, I've never used MSIE on a platform other than Windows or Macintosh, so maybe there's something about it I don't know (is it really stable under Solaris, or something)?
Was the submission intended to be sarcastic? I couldn't tell.
You crackhead!! WTF are you talking about?????
The day Microsoft invented UNIX, the Internet, TCP/IP, and all other technologies we take for granted today [Intended humor noted, but didn't Al Gore do those things?-Ed.]
No, but he created the initial Al-Gore-ithm
Maybe someone already pointed this out, but AT&T doesn't own the rights to Unix any more. AT&T sold the Unix System Laboratory to Novell in 1993, and Novell sold the rights to SCO. SCO assigned the rights to brand "Unix" as Unix to the X/Open Group. That's why Linux isn't "Unix" in the legal sense; no one has paid for it to go through the branding tests.
You really need to read 'Introduction to Computing
for complete idiots'.
Grunt. Oink, oink.
..how can you actually write and compile a program without a language standard?
The point being..?
(insert vacuous remarks concerning the chicken and the egg here)
~ Kish
How could they forget the single most important moment in the whole Unix history until now?
The day I read a trade magazine article about Bayer using Solaris because NT couldn't perform the task-and they tried darn near everything to make NT work.
Does anyone have a copy of this article? Or, can they point me to the relevant URL?
The end of the 20th century ( and the second millenium ) is at 31. dec. 2000. Everyone who attended basic scholl knows that , but they are obviously in minority.