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The Top UNIX Moments of the Century

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the gearing-up-for-the-next-millenium dept.

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. ;-)

6 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. umm... by ywwg · · Score: 3

    Is it just me or was the following entry missing:
    * Linus Torvalds uploads the linux kernel

    I mean really, that's a given!

    1. Re:umm... by BrianH · · Score: 3

      I personally consider it an excercise in semantics to argue this point, but technically he's correct in saying that Linux is not UNIX.

      UNIX was originally developed in the 70's under the auspices of AT&T Bell Labs. Because of that, AT&T owns the rights to Unix and it's direct derivatives, and receives a royalty for each true Unix sold (and no, it probably won't ever be GPL'd).

      In the early 90's, Linus Torvalds was working with a Unix derivative known as Minix, when he began working on what became Linux. He did that for two reasons: A) Minix is not free and couldn't be redistributed. B) He thought he could do a "better" job than the Minix developers had. Now, here's where the important difference between Linux and UNIX comes in. Linus couldn't use the source from UNIX to develop Linux or he'd have been forced to pay royalties (and Linux would not be free). What he did instead was write his OS so that it would be very similar, and yet not infringe on any copyrights. Because Linux uses no UNIX code, and yet is so similar to UNIX, it's proper designation is as a "UNIX clone". Nevertheless, it should also be pointed out that there are quite a few differences between Linux and the commercial Unixes, a fact I personally learned the hard way after scamming my way into a Unix administration job based on my knowledge of Linux. While I wasn't exactly lost, it was definitely "different" (AIX, in case you're wondering).

      --

      There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
    2. Re:umm... by Raul+Acevedo · · Score: 3

      Ironically, they mention the release of Netscape on Linux, without mentioning the release of Linux itself...
      ----------

      --
      In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
  2. Greatest moment? The release of Edition 7. by edhall · · Score: 5

    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.
    -Ed
  3. Re:FORTRAN based UNIX? by Repton · · Score: 4
    Someone should rewrite UNIX in FORTRAN.

    Too right. It's time the Real Programmers reclaimed UN*X from the quiche eaters. Recently, the trend has been to make UN*X easy to use. The 'people' behind this abomination seem not to realise: if we do this, people will use it!

    It is clear that steps must be taken. In addition to rewriting UN*X in FORTRAN, I propose additional measures:

    • All UN*X program names to be shortened to 6 characters or less, by arbitrary removal of letters. Obscurity is a plus.
    • UN*X shell to be rewritten: Shell programming is now done in INTERCAL. (it goes without saying that we rm -rf the entire X source tree)
    • The only editor available will be TECO (although I suppose ed may be appropriate also).

    It is only through measures such as these that UN*X can return to its glory days.

    Fight the good fight, gentlemen.

    Remeber: If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.

    --
    Repton.

    --
    Repton.
    They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
  4. I'd have to agree with the creation of vi by Tet · · Score: 3
    Not because it's a great text editor (although I've yet to find anything better :-), but because it prompted the development of termcap to give terminal independence. Previous applications had been hardcoded to use the escape sequences of a particular terminal.

    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