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. ;-)

Comments

Greatest moment? The release of Edition 7.

[edhall]

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

Re:FORTRAN based UNIX?

[Repton]

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.