by glaze on 8/20/09, 12:19 PM with 34 comments
by mechanical_fish on 8/20/09, 12:59 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook
Now entirely obsolete, of course. Today everyone has come to love everything about Unix, the most perfect OS in this best of all possible worlds. ;)
by 10ren on 8/20/09, 1:19 PM
Unix: small and hacked together, success.
Plan 9: carefully engineered, fail.
I'm not sure what the lesson is here... there's that "worse is better" essay... maybe it's that when great engineers let their hair down, they do much better?
by kragen on 8/20/09, 7:04 PM
Unix had computer networking built in from the start
Bill Joy and his buddies added networking to Unix in 4.2BSD around 1977, 8 years after the start.
Work on Unix began ... after AT&T, ..., MIT and GE pulled the plug on ... Multics.
AT&T pulled out in April 1969, but the development of Multics continued elsewhere; GE/Honeywell/Bull worked on it until 1990: http://www.multicians.org/chrono.html
The syntax of many of those commands, such as chdir and cat, are still in use 40 years on.
chdir doesn't exist on Unix. It's cd.
The idea of users directly interacting with the machine was downright revolutionary.
In a way, yes. But this revolutionary idea was also present in CTSS and Multics before Unix started, heavily backed by DARPA, and the major reason for the ARPANET project that began in 1969. By the time Unix V7 was out (in 1977?), in addition to many timesharing systems, PARC was pursuing Alan Kay's 1969 Dynabook vision, there were Altos in operation at PARC, the Star was well on its way to production, and thousands of Altairs had been sold, not to mention things like the COSMAC ELF, the IMSAI, the Osborne 1, and the Apple ][. All of these had, as their central principle, the idea of users interacting directly with the machine.
What helped this grassroots movement was AT&T's willingness to give the software away for free.
Not to anybody but universities, and I think even an academic license included some derisory fee.
In May 1975 it got another boost by becoming the chosen operating system for the internet.
Not even close. If there was a chosen operating system for the internet in the late 1970s, it was TOPS-20.
The wars are over and the Unix specification is looked after by the Open Group - an industry body set up to police what is done in the operating system's name.
That is a severe misrepresentation both of the origin of OSF and of the current activities of the Open Group.
by RyanMcGreal on 8/20/09, 3:04 PM
Of course there are plenty of desktop Linux distros, but most Linux machines in the wild are running servers.
by 100k on 8/21/09, 7:36 AM
http://www.amazon.com/Quarter-Century-UNIX-Addison-Wesley-Sy...