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Unix Operating Systems Software Programming IT Technology

Unix's Founding Fathers 308

Posted by michael from the uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow dept.
Dave B writes "There's a nice article on Economist.com about Dennis Ritchie, the genesis of Unix, and the C programming language."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Unix's Founding Fathers More

Unix's Founding Fathers

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  • Stangely (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:08AM (#9799029)
    it doesn't ask what would have happened had it all been patented, back in the day. Nice bit of history, but it was a remarkably different way of operating back then.

    • The funny thing is (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:23AM (#9799072)
      UNIX wouldn't be where it were today if it weren't for patents. Not because patents were useful in the development, or because the initial C/UNIX technology was patented-- it wasn't-- but because about the first commercial sale of UNIX, the first big test case where things were ironed out, was in processing applications for the united states patent department.

    • Re:Stangely (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ultrabot ( 200914 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:23AM (#9799073)
      it doesn't ask what would have happened had it all been patented, back in the day.

      Simple - it would be dead. Just like the WWW if it were patented. Or Linux (well, not patented but placed under proprietary license).

    • Re:Stangely (Score:3, Interesting)

      by black mariah ( 654971 )
      Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not a damn thing would have been different. It wasn't Free Software, ever. It was all duly licensed and inspected and all that good crap. It was proprietary software, patents wouldn't have done a thing to it.

      • Re:Stangely (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:10AM (#9799197)
        Patents are not the same as copyright. With copyright, you only have to avoid using the same code (iow copying). With patents you have to avoid using any of the patented concepts. In some cases this means having to use a vastly inferior algorithm, even if you came up with the better one yourself and would have written your own code. If Hoare had patented Quicksort, people would have had to use Bubblesort for decades or pay licensing fees, which is impossible for Open Source projects.

        • Re:Stangely (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:37AM (#9799270)
          But do you really think that algorithmes and "concepts" should be patentable? Where do you draw the line? At what point does a "new" technology become a barrier to devellopment then? I think that the current state of thinking (in the US mostly) about software and logic patents is absolutely ludicrous. I mean the basic innovation in Unix is to keep the kernel small and efficient. Is that patentable? What about the tools approach? Is that patentable? Ludicrous as patenting the concept of a street or sidewalk. Or 2+2 for that matter. The fact that Ritchie's work at the Labs was property of his employer had only as an effect that other instances of the system where stimulated to review the programs and make rewrites for their implementation, as such we have a better software now than then. This is done through collaboration and competition all rolled into one. Nothing a patent could make better here.

      • Re:Stangely (Score:5, Insightful)

        by spektr ( 466069 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:39AM (#9799276)
        It was proprietary software, patents wouldn't have done a thing to it.

        There's a difference between proprietary software and patented software. BSD could easily reimplement all proprietary parts of UNIX and won the lawsuit that followed. But if these parts had been patented ("e.g. a method to write an OS using a programming language"), that wouldn't be possible. I think you're either uninformed or trolling, or both.

        There was an implementation of UNIX and it was proprietary. But there were other implementations of UNIX that were free. What matters isn't some implementation, but ideas. And the idea of UNIX hasn't been developed only by AT&T, but also by the UNIX community - in a open way, since the beginning. Patent that and UNIX is dead.

        • Re:Stangely (Score:3, Informative)

          by black mariah ( 654971 )
          I'm neither uninformed nor trolling. When I'm trolling, you'll know it by the fountains of blood and endless trail of dead Slasbots in my wake.

          AT&T was forced to license its software to anyone that wanted it. Patented or not, they had to license it. By the time they were no longer required to license their software, most every patent for the main gist of UNIX would have lapsed.
          • AT&T was forced to license its software to anyone that wanted it. Patented or not, they had to license it.

            If that was your point you should have said it more clearly. A patent that is licenced to everyone for free is as good as no patent.

            But I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the situation. AT&T wasn't allowed to make money with computer software, but I don't think that means that they had to free every patent they couldn't sell. They could have patented it and simply refuse to license

      • Re:Stangely (Score:5, Informative)

        by Sique ( 173459 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:41AM (#9799280) Homepage
        It was stated in the article that between 1958 and 1984 AT&T had to license all its non-telephonic stuff to whoever asked at fairly reasonable conditions. While it was not true free software, many companies and universities at the time were able to get hold of the license, the documentation and the source code and started to modify it and develop their own versions.

        University of California in Berkeley contributed many tools to UNIX and even started to recode UNIX from scratch, following the original UNIX just within the specification limits in 1977, but based everything on its own code.

        When in 1984 AT&T was freed from the anti trust provisions given in 1958, AT&T tried to get the control back over UNIX, which lead to the founding of the GNU organisation and to a legal battle with UCB. The legal battle finally ended with a draw, so the BSD line of UNIX was cleared from copyright infringment accusions, and the BSD tools are still with the AT&T-based UNIX versions.

        So UNIX was in the beginning something quite indifferent between proprietary and free software, basicly a proprietary system which was handled like a free and open source one. This was the fallacy of the system: After 12 years of free work on UNIX suddenly AT&T changed the licensing and the way the licenses were enforced. The GNU Project tied to make sure that no one contributing to GNU could pull an AT&T again by requiring all code contributed to GNU should be licensed via GPL.

      • Re:Stangely (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )
        well, copyrights are meant to keep people from using a copy of your work without your permission.

        patents are meant to keep other people from writing the same thing..

        so.. if the command line for example was patented..

        .
        • so.. if the command line for example was patented..
          Then you'd have to come up with something different.
          • Then you'd have to come up with something different.

            Some old SF novel had a quote that applies to this: "When it is railroading time you build railroads". The 70's were the time of the command line - computing power would not allow any other sort of ui.

            So no, they wouldn't have come up with something different.

            • Oh, yes they would.... (Score:3, Interesting)

              by tiger99 ( 725715 )
              We would all still be programming with a panel of lights and toggle switches, as was common up till about the era of the PDP-11. I remember once keying in a bootstrap loader that way, fortunately it was only a very short one, designed to load a longer one from a punched tape.

              Software patents would have killed progress than, as they are doing now.

        • Don't give Sir Bill ideas.....

          After all, most of the software patents that seem to be granted are for things where there has been lots of prior art, this would be no exception if it was submitted to the overworked USPTO.

      • Unix WAS patented, which is WHY it spread (Score:5, Informative)

        by js7a ( 579872 ) <james@bov i k .org> on Monday July 26, 2004 @04:00AM (#9799332) Homepage Journal
        ... It was proprietary software, patents wouldn't have done a thing to it.
        Actually, a crucial part of Unix was patented, before software patents were technically allowed. But the fact that it had been was the main reason that Unix spread so rapidly in the 70s and 80s.

        Back in the 70s, Bell Labs was required by an antitrust consent decree of January 1956 to reveal what patents it had applied for, supply information about them to competitors, and license them in anticipation of issuance to anyone for nominal fees. Any source code covered by such a Bell Labs patent also had to be licensed for a nominal fee. So about every computer science department on the planet was able to obtain the Unix source.

        The patent in question was for the setuid bit, U.S. No. 4,135,240 [uspto.gov]. If you look at it, you will see that it is apparently a hardware patent! This is the kicker paragraph:

        ... So far this Detailed Description has described the file access control information associated with each stored file, and the function of each piece of information in regulating access to the associated file. It remains now to complete this Detailed Description by illustrating an implementation giving concrete form to this functional description. To those skilled in the computer art it is obvious that such an implementation can be expressed either in terms of a computer program (software) implementation or a computer circuitry (hardware) implementation, the two being functional equivalents of one another.
        It will be understood that a functionally equivalent software embodiment is within the scope of the inventive contribution herein described. For some purposes a software embodiment may likely be preferrable in practice.
        Technically, even though that said it "will be understood," and was understood by everyone as a software patent, it wasn't until the 1981 Supreme case of Diamond v. Diehr that it became enforcable as such. Perhaps that is why the patent took six years to issue back in the 70s.

        So, through the 1970s, Unix spread because it was covered by an unenforcable software patent! Doug McIlroy said, "AT&T distributed Unix with the understanding that a license fee would be collected if and when the setuid patent issued. When the event finally occurred, the logistical problems of retroactively collecting small fees from hundreds of licensees did not seem worth the effort, so the patent was placed in the public domain."

    • Re:Stangely (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ModernGeek ( 601932 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:02AM (#9799177)
      If it would have been patented, there would be no linux, no open standards, all would be closed, compaq's would run compaq os, ibm's would run OS/2, dell would run DellOS. Noone could make software in one language and have it interoperate between operating systems like we seemlessly do today thanks to C. We would have to pay money to develop software, we would spend more time worrying about liscensing then actually programming. Computing would not be what it is today. Thank god they did not patent any of it.

      • Re:Stangely (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        setuid has a patent [delphion.com]. Assigned to public domain I believe.

      • Re:Stangely (Score:4, Interesting)

        by zoeblade ( 600058 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @06:08AM (#9799731) Homepage

        Computing would not be what it is today. Thank god they did not patent any of it.

        I like to think that the GNU project (and FreeDOS for that matter) would still have found a way to make free operating systems, even if they had to not base them at all whatsoever on any existing ones.

    • Re:Stangely (Score:4, Informative)

      by alangmead ( 109702 ) * on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:36AM (#9799268)

      But it was, to the limit of patentability that was available at the time. This was before Diamond v. Diehr [bitlaw.com]and the US patent office deemed software as "pure mathamatics" and unpatentable. The patent that was developed from Unix, the setuid patent [uspto.gov] was written in terms of the gates in memory that got flipped and read to check access control.

      If Bell Labs hadn't assigned the patent to the public domain (supposedly over the cost of collecting license fees [mit.edu]) Then development on Unix clones would have started much later.

    • Re: Patents? Oh-the-irony (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Anyone catches the irony in the fact that Thompson & Ritchie ported Unix to the PDP-11 so that the Patent Guys at AT&T could get a word processor?

      These patent laywers can't even recognize the birth of a major technical breakthru even if it's placed in front of them. *grin*

      Why didn't it occur to them to ask: -Is there something here, that we ought to patent? How about those pipe-thingies? Or the notion that everything is just a file? Or ''the use of an intermediate language to port a computer opera

  • On the fifth day... (Score:4, Funny)

    by chris_eineke ( 634570 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:13AM (#9799037) Homepage Journal
    And God spake: "Let there be hell!" and thus the C programming language was born. ;)
    • "Let there be hell!" and thus the C programming language was born.

      I think you misspelled "perl" there...

    • I hear some people even prefer csh... sadists!

    • Re:On the fifth day... (Score:4, Funny)

      by ultrabot ( 200914 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:19AM (#9799061)
      And God spake: "Let there be hell!" and thus the C programming language was born.

      In fact, if you study the history more carefully, you'll find that God only licensed some thought patterns and algorithms from SCO Group. God still has to abide by the licensing conditions stated therein.

      "In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was copyright (R) of SCO Group"

    • Re:On the fifth day... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tony-A ( 29931 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:50AM (#9799146)
      "And because Dr Ritchie had been careful to keep the core of C very compact, this [write a compiler] was relatively easy to do."

      Personally I think C is a lousy language, but:
      It is small.
      It is compilable.
      It is useable.

      It is possible to make forward progress with minimal resources.
      Something much better that requires resources you do not have is just pie in the sky.

    • Re:On the fifth day... (Score:5, Funny)

      by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:15AM (#9799216) Homepage
      You've never programmed in COBOL have you?

      Rus

      • Re:On the fifth day... (Score:5, Informative)

        by fuzzix ( 700457 ) <flippy@example.com> on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:52AM (#9799312) Journal
        You've never programmed in COBOL have you?

        I have. It's my job. For those of you who have not encountered COBOL, its reputation [catb.org] is warranted. It is actually designed for clueless suits and it will damage you [catb.org], both mentally and physically. This is true.

        I do not wear a suit. I am not totally clueless. I am just doing this job to get some cash together to go to university next year.

        The thing is, this place (like most COBOL houses) has a set of standards which may or may not match best practice (when they don't it makes things harder - you may be required to use GO TO!) Any opportunity for hackishness or clever code, small as this opportunity is anyway, is precluded by the necessity to adhere to standards so that the next drone that takes your place will understand your code. No amount of commenting inline on how your nice, elegant piece of code works will sway your manager on this topic. This leads to verbose, inelegant code and an acute difficulty in getting things done in a simple and timely manner.

        This is why I love C, C++, Perl, bash, JavaScript, BASIC, HTML, Brainf*ck - hell, I even prefer VB - anything but fscking COBOL!
        • COBOL, its reputation is warranted. It is actually designed for clueless suits and it will damage you, both mentally and physically.

          Cobol fingers? But we are in XXI centure and do not need to type all this clueless staff in - we have text editor [vim.org] or two [xemacs.org] which do completion for us.
          • Cobol fingers? But we are in XXI centure and do not need to type all this clueless staff in - we have text editor or two which do completion for us

            A fine point, but I have to write this code on a clucky OS/390 editor. I would use an editor on this Windows host (another bane of my job) but the transfer facilities for transferring files from the host to the mainframe simply do not work.

    • Re:On the fifth day... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      that's a dumb post. c replaced assembly coding - essentially, it is structured, portable assembly - huge improvement over actual assembly (well, maybe except for 68k).

    • Re:On the fifth day... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Curtis Clifton ( 689971 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @09:01AM (#9800972) Homepage
      And God spake: "Let there be hell!" and thus the C programming language was born. ;)

      Blasphemy! (Feel free to choose which half of the quote I'm talking about. :-)

      At the time of its creation, C was a real work of brilliance. Without the shoulders of C on which to stand, computing wouldn't be nearly as mature as it is today.

      Kernighan and Ritchie's little white book on C is a masterpiece. All language reference manuals should strive to its level of clear writing and careful presentation. Despite not having coded a line of C in over 10 years, I still keep K&R at arms length. (If nothing else, it's helpful for quickly verifying my spelling of Kernighan when writing Slashdot posts.) It was enjoyable to read a column about the old masters.

      Peace,

  • Modules (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:13AM (#9799038) Homepage
    Nice article and it explains nicely why *NIX is modular in that you can pass output from one command to another via pipes. Quite simply it was just an idea and a dman good one at that.

    R

    • Re:Modules (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:40AM (#9799121)
      *NIX is modular in that you can pass output from one command to another via pipes
      Definitely, and I think what escapes modern comp sci people is the incredible flexibility of being able to use several simple, distinct programs together to achieve a broader processing goal. Data flow between processes achieves the best separation possible, allows for the ultimate 'compatibility' (inter-process communication) and leaves performance monitoring/control to the OS. In the long term, the UNIX model sounds like a winner to me.

      • Re:Modules (Score:5, Interesting)

        by master_p ( 608214 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @05:44AM (#9799649)
        What the Unix guys did is to invent object orientation before the concept was actually invented. The Unix system *is* object oriented: each program is like an object that implements one interface with two methods: the input and the output. By wiring objects together, all sorts of processing was possible.

        Another innovation was that each program did one thing only, and the wiring between programs was not hardcoded. One could write a million programs, each one doing a different task, but it was the capability of wiring them at will that gave Unix such flexibility.

        The analogous of today would be if we did not program applications, we only programmed classes and then a 3rd party came and wired these classes together. Unfortunately, modern application development has chosen not to follow this way: applications consist of classes that are hardwired into a fixed set that makes change and rapid development difficult.

        Finally, another good property of the Unix way is that there was no datatypes. Everything was text processing. We have come a full circle now that XML dominates the industry...it took us 30 years only to realize that text is the ultimate carrier of information.

        • Re:Modules (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Decaff ( 42676 )
          it was the capability of wiring them at will that gave Unix such flexibility.

          Not just that - if you connected programs together with pipes they could run as parallel tasks. It was an easy way for even novice users to make full use of powerful machines.

          This is why all users should learn the Unix command line.

        • Re:Modules (Score:4, Informative)

          by Curtis Clifton ( 689971 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @09:06AM (#9801012) Homepage
          What the Unix guys did is to invent object orientation before the concept was actually invented.

          Object-oriented programming in Simula predates Unix by nearly a decade.

        • Re:Modules (Score:3, Informative)

          by tengwar ( 600847 )
          Rubbish! Objects contain state (instance variables) and have a set of operations which can be performed on them (methods or member functions). Anything that just takes input and returns output is at best a function.
    • *nix was and still is ONLY true user-friendly system on the marked. It is becouse it doesn't require user to interact with applications. If user don't want to, he can use yes to provide input or grep to minimize amount of output.


      It is a rule completely forgotten in newer OSes -
      If you don't like to read output of this program, let other program do it

  • quick history leason (Score:3, Interesting)

    by karmagardless ( 800169 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:18AM (#9799059)
    Thompson and Ritchie wrote Unix to play a game on. To make it portable they wrote C and a compiler. This was done at Bell Labs on their dime. They let Berkley, and some others, have copies to evaluate and improve, thus causing BSD, and other variants. AT&T allows this and causes the forking of Unix. Then through mirad stupidity and laywer speak we end up with todays chinese fire drill. All because AT&T did not think to guard their original IP by copyrighting it. Then allowed several groups to modify it without central control.

    At least all Linux kernal mods have to be approved by Linus. It's more control than AT&T ever exerted when it mattered.
    • At least all Linux kernal mods have to be approved by Linus.

      They only have to be approved by Linus to make it into the "Official" tree. You, I or anyone else could make all of the patches we want and fork the kernel.

      One huge difference between Linux and *NIX is that there is such a fanatical following that if someone does decide to fork the kernel there had better be a damned good reason or else the fork will have no users.

      LK
      • But Linus has a trademark on the term "Linux". He could probably prevent you from calling your forked OS "Linux" is he wanted to.
    • Had AT+T successfully exerted central control, do you think Unix would have become popular?

      --Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

    • Re:quick history leason (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No no no nope. First of all, it was stated in the article. Secondly, it is common knowledge to people who lived and watched the nightly news with Walter Cronkite in those times that the gubbmint used to actively prevent tech monopolies in the public interest. This is not to say there were no monopolies, but new ones were monitored closely and shot to hell if they looked active and this was the case of AT&T.
      It wasn't about whether it was copyrighted or even patented. They were under order, just like
    • AT&T COULDN'T sell unix at the time (read the article), thats why it was bascially given away to the universities to start with.
    • UNIX was protected by copyrights, licenses and trade secrets. AT&T had plenty of lawyers. You needed a source license from AT&T to get the BSD source, as it was plainly a derivative work. AT&T did protect their IP. Thet just had liberal licensing terms, assuming that you had the money for the licenses. They had no desire to exercise "central control" over their licensees, which is a good thing. There were solid legal reasons for the way AT&T licensed UNIX, which are too complicated to go int

  • How things have changed.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Savet Hegar ( 791567 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:23AM (#9799070)
    I miss the old-time mentality of things. People like this developed things because it made sense. They didn't file for 20+ patents a day. They didn't litigate against companies working on a project with similar goals. It's too bad companies (like SCO) can't spend their time developing something useful instead of sueing the companies that are truly doing something good for the IT community.
    • WHy spend time on development when you can hire lawyers to sue people so you can make money that way

      Rus

    • Pass that bong, dude (Score:4, Insightful)

      by melted ( 227442 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:22AM (#9799237) Homepage
      Unices were SO proprietary back in the day Microsoft is a child's play in comparison. Ever heard of FreeBSD and a lawsuit against them? UNIX systems used to cost a heck of a lot, and the entire UNIX world was thoroughly licensed and lawyer-infested. On top of that UNIX companies used to fight each other and pull "embrace and extend" thing when on the surface the system would remain POSIX compatible, but to use its advanced features you'd have to sell your soul to the devil and go entirely incompatible with everything else.

      MS entered server market precisely because of this situation. It was a low cost, no hassle alternative to UNIX that was good enough for small and medium businesses.
    • They didn't file for 20+ patents a day.

      *snort* Unix development was funded as the basis for a typesetting system for the patent department of AT&T! Still, they didn't file a load of patents on their software - the setuid bit is the only patented Unix feature I'm aware of.

  • UNIX was meant as a hoax (Score:5, Funny)

    by tijsvd ( 548670 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:24AM (#9799075) Homepage
    Read this article:

    Creators admit UNIX, C hoax [gnu.org]

  • "The first version of Unix was written by Dr Thompson for the PDP-7, a computer made by the Digital Equipment Corporation, which cost a mere $72,000, and came with eight kilobytes of memory, and a hard disk a bit smaller than a megabyte. " This was 30 years ago. I sure am glad a computer capable of running Linux can be bought for 1/100, or $720, these days...

  • Dear Dennis (Score:5, Funny)

    by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:36AM (#9799111)
    i have never hurd of this C language, is it like C# or ASP ? I think it is very complicated and doesnt work with modern OOP models. my comp sci teacher says it has acadehmic value but the 1970s are over the language porbably doesnt have use in modern computers?
    • You disturb me, sir.
    • Heh. I especially love the way you misspelled "acadehmic", it really adds something to the post ;-)

  • UNIX forever? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Proc6 ( 518858 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:39AM (#9799116)
    This article seems as fitting as any to ask a question that always rolls around in my mind. While the beginning of my own computing career was in IRIX and Solaris, and now with most of my time spent on Windows machines I, of course, still understand UNIXs power and miss working with it daily.

    But I guess I'm curious as to why nearly all OS focus is on UNIX or a derivative? From Linus's knock off, to Mac moving to a UNIX core to even the pretty original BeOS. Why are we reinventing the wheel and not coming up with something completely new?

    This is not a troll, I am just looking for the various opinions. Is UNIX the basis for everything non-Microsoft because it's the pinnacle of perfection? Or, like movie plots, did 1 person invent a good thing and everyone else just replicates it with their own flare? It seems to me by now we might have 20/20 hindsight, a whole lot of real world usage and a completely new operating system based on "nothing" might be even better? I've heard of course the "because as soon as you have UNIX, you have access to a zillion packages that port easily", which is great, but frankly, does it matter that I can get X's little "Eyes" app running under my new BobIX OS in under 15 minutes? Maybe writing a completely new "Eyes" under a new OS could be as fast or faster than a UNIX port to a UNIX OS if the new OS was built right? The UNIX filesystem is a mess, that's always bothered me. I dont know, again, not a troll, UNIX rocks - just wondering why there isn't (or if there is?) any group out there writing completely new from the ground up without using UNIX as their model?

    • Re:UNIX forever? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by joeykiller ( 119489 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:48AM (#9799143) Journal
      I dont know, again, not a troll, UNIX rocks - just wondering why there isn't (or if there is?) any group out there writing completely new from the ground up without using UNIX as their model?
      I don't know if this is satifying enough for you, but check out ReactOS [reactos.org]. These guys are writing a Windows NT 4 clone from the ground up. Granted, they're not starting from scratch with entirely new ideas, but at least they're satisfying your demand of writing an OS "without using UNIX as their model".

    • Mimicing Unix.... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Savet Hegar ( 791567 )
      I think the reason so many try to mimic unix is because it is already the industry standard. Linux handles things differently, but the end result is fairly transparent to the end user. So one can switch from a Unix system to a Linux system (or vice versa) and have a good grasp of how things work.

      With Linux being open source, and the BSD variants available as well, I don't see much of a need to reinvent the wheel. Not to flame Microsoft (though I definately never mind doing that), but they are living pro

    • Re:UNIX forever? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by skyman8081 ( 681052 )
      Yes, I agree, that the UNIX'y way of things is showing it's age.

      I mean, there have been some really good efforts to de-unixify unix, such as the STEP's (NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, Rhapsody, OS X)
      how many normal users are going to figure out what /bin /usr /var /etc /sbin mean?
      I know a at least two Linux distros that are going to attempt to fix this, GenSTEP [sourceforge.net] and Komodo [komodolinux.org]

      from what I have seen and heard from the developers, the release looks to be very promising in terms of leaving behind the old timey UNIX g
    • There are several answers to this about why most OSes are Unix derivatives.

      For one, Unix got a lot of things right, right from the beginning. Second, some of those that it missed became the standard when added later (tcp/ip, threads). Third, writing an OS is a major undertaking, somewhere in the order of thousands of man-years. "Borrowing" ideas from another OS can help reduce this start up time. Lastly, lack of imagination. We teach our young geeks that linux/unix is the end-all and be-all and guess what?

    • Re:UNIX forever? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ewe2 ( 47163 )

      To help answer your question (and it's a damn good one), I'd make two observations:

      1. It's more than just one great idea or a collection of great ideas. It's all of those and a synergy between them. To beat it you have to more than replicate, but surpass that kind of synergy. It's a good reason why people have preferred to build on the core ideas rather than replace them.
      2. Very few real resources are being put into OS research any more. Rob Pike put it best [bell-labs.com], but in a nutshell, there's no money in it, and it's

    • Re:UNIX forever? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pthisis ( 27352 )
      But I guess I'm curious as to why nearly all OS focus is on UNIX or a derivative? From Linus's knock off, to Mac moving to a UNIX core to even the pretty original BeOS. Why are we reinventing the wheel and not coming up with something completely new?

      This is not a troll, I am just looking for the various opinions. Is UNIX the basis for everything non-Microsoft because it's the pinnacle of perfection? Or, like movie plots, did 1 person invent a good thing and everyone else just replicates it with their own f

  • I Just Hope... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zenmojodaddy ( 754377 )
    RMS doesn't read the bit about Linus deciding to write a UNIX-like operating system from scratch.

    *listens carefully, hears distant wailing and gnashing of teeth*

    Oh dear.

  • designers (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pchan- ( 118053 )
    the real question is, what is that programming language they have over ritchie's image? it's certainly not c. i've never seen it before, but it looks pretty lame.

    • Re:designers (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )
      Googling the keywords highlighted in yellow turns up a Filepro developer's reference, a Recital/4GL reference, and a page which is so badly formatted I didn't try reading it. Removing "clears" from the search brings up a lot FoxPro pages.
    • I saw that And decided it was some sort of ancient non-language, that typesetters use to the take place of real source when they don't have any.

  • I didn't RTFA because... (Score:5, Funny)

    by john_smith_45678 ( 607592 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:47AM (#9799138) Journal
    The Genesis of Unix is already included in the Unix Bible!

    The Bible According to Unix

    Genesis

    Chapter 0

    0. In the Beginning Ritchie created the PDP-11 and the UNIX.
    1. And the UNIX was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the system programmers.
    2. And Ritchie said, "Let there be portability!" And nothing happened, so Ritchie realized that he had his work cut out for him.
    .
    25. And Ritchie said to Kernighan, "Let us make C in the image of B, after our own whims: and let it have dominion over the I and the O and all that runneth upon the UNIX," and it was almost, but not quite so... so he realized that he had his work cut out for him again.
    .

    Chapter 1

    0. Thus the PDP-11 and the UNIX were finished, and all the programs in them.
    1. And on the seventh shift Ritchie ended his work which he had made; and he would have rested on the seventh shift from all the work which he had made, if it weren't for the system crash.
    .

    Chapter 2

    0. 0 Now the COBOL was more verbose than any language of the PDP-11, and he said unto the programmer, "Yea, hath the Manual said, 'Ye shalt not read of every device of the network?'"
    1 And the programmer said unto the COBOL, "We may read of every device of the network:
    2 But of the registers of the printer in the midst of the network, the Manual hath said, 'Ye shall not read of it, neither shall ye write to it without proper protocol, lest ye cause a system crash.'"
    3 And the COBOL said unto the programmer, "Ye shalt not surely crash the system:
    4 For Ritchie doth know that in the time slice ye read thereof, then your I/O shall be opened, and ye shalt be as system operators, accessing locked accounts with unlimited privileges."
    5 And then when the programmer saw that the printer was good for interfacing, and that it was pleasant to the I (and to the O),...
    6 And they realized they were unstructured, so they patched RATFOR subroutines...
    .

    The Gospel

    0. And the Messiah shalt come, born a mere B but to grow up into the Saviour C,
    1. Wherein true structured programming may be achieved, yea, verily, yet while being able to do bit shifting.
    2. For although the Law (Pascal) hath been given, the Law cannot

    for (i=0; str1[i]!='\0'; i++)
    str2[i] += (str1[i]>='A' && str1[i]<='Z') ? 32 : 0;

    but must

    i := 0;
    while (i <= length(str1)) do
    begin
    if str1[i] in ['A'..'Z'] then
    str2[i] := chr( ord(str1[i]) + 32))
    else
    str1[i] := str2[i];
    i := i + 1;
    end;

    The Revelation

    0. Yea, in those last days, the Saviour shalt come again, but enhanced, in the rainment of C++
    1. And then shalt the Beast, FORTRAN, and the AntiC, COBOL, be thrown into the trash HEAP where there is weeping and byting of pins.
    2. And all the faithful programmers shalt be led into CRAY where billions of MIPS are at each one's fingertips

  • The sad loss of the terminal room (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Paul Crowley ( 837 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:01AM (#9799171) Homepage Journal
    Dr Pike says that the thing he misses most from the 1970s at Bell Labs was the terminal room. Because computers were rare at the time, people did not have them on their desks, but rather went to the room, one side of which was covered with whiteboards, and sat down at a random computer to work. The technical hub of the system became the social hub.

    Even /. readers occasionally want to see people face-to-face. Even if we're arranging meetings over IM and bringing WiFi laptops, let's occasionally try to set eyes on other geeks :-)

  • Does anyone know.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sfraggle ( 212671 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:25AM (#9799246) Homepage
    Just what programming language is the code in this [economist.com] image written in? You'd think for Unix they'd use C or bourne shell, but it seems apparently not..

  • Bare facts (Score:5, Funny)

    by Decaff ( 42676 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:40AM (#9799277)
    Amazingly, it ran without an embedded browser and media player.

  • Bragging... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tore S B ( 711705 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @03:56AM (#9799318) Homepage
    Allright, allright, I'm bragging, but... I have a PDP-7!
    Don't believe me? My pics. [nortia.no]
    Please don't link to the main site, though, it's very much under construction.

  • Historical errors in article (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tore S B ( 711705 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @04:25AM (#9799399) Homepage
    The article makes a few mistakes. First of all, Unix was far from the first OS to be written in a high-level language. Multics was the first big OS (PL/1!! Shudder!), and there were many research OS'en at the time.

    Also, the PDP-7 did NOT have a hard drive. Believe me, I have one. The PDP-7 did, however, have an optional model 24 Serial Drum (something like a low-capacity fixed-head hard drive, around 100KB IIRC), whose capacity I cannot recall, a 555 Dual DECTape unit, a directly addressable very-low-density even by its time magnetic tape system, and, of course, the 10 cps paper tape punch/ 300cps High-Speed Optical paper tape reader. But there was never a moving head hard drive. The PDP-8 had one, but I can't for the life of me remember the name.

    The PDP-7 was an 18-bit, 15-bit adressed system.

  • The moral of the story is... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by peterpi ( 585134 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @04:59AM (#9799478)
    Managers: If you have a couple of coders with nothing to do for a month or two, don't panic. Tell them to do what the hell they want and they'll come up with something useful.

  • Say what? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    But Bjarne Stroustrup, who came to the Labs later and designed C++, a further improved version of C, disagrees.

    C++ is a further improved version of C? Excuse me whilst I double over with laughter. I understand OO very well; but OO as implemented in C++ just makes me want to gag. Objective C is an example of a good way to add OO to C. C++ is not.

    I would definitely prefer programming in Java over programming in C++. Actually, come to think of it, I'd prefer programming in Visual Basic (*hack* *cough*) over

    • Seriously, I've worked with C, VB, C#, Java, C++, and there really was nothing worse than C++. At least VB and C# come with a kickass dev environment. C++ was awful even in that kickass dev env.

  • Better links for Dennis Ritchie (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ishmalius ( 153450 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @08:51AM (#9800874)
    I often give Prof. Ritchie's home page [bell-labs.com] to newbs and students, and especially his excellent self-history of the development of the C language. [bell-labs.com]

    It should be noted by detractors of C, that Mr. Ritchie himself does not think that his brainchild is perfect. This discussion contains a "Critique" section where he analyzes the strengths and failures of the language. At the end, he summarizes the language thusly: "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."

    ...to which I certainly agree. It is fraught with numerous failings, yet C gets the job done, and carpets the computer world.

  • Origins (Score:3, Funny)

    by certsoft ( 442059 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @05:23PM (#9806376) Homepage
    The origins of C and Pascal:
    • Pascal - A University in Zuerich
    • C - A phone company in New Jersey

    Laugh, it's funny.

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