The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall. 

I've been looking for this comment. This guy not only has a great sense of humour, but he does his research. Either that, or he's a lot older than he sounds.

😆

In the context of Unix, it really should be "vi" not "vim". I remember taking the source for it and porting it other operating systems, notably OS/9 a RTOS that I don't people even remember.

vi, emacs, nano, yup, all starts by changing the default editor.

@@michaelhoffmann2891 Remember it, I've never heard of it. I stopped at OS/2. 😉

Within the IT community however, Ritchie and Thompson were at least as famous as Steve Jobs, if not more. Whereas Jobs (along with Wozniak) was most of the time acknowledged for the Apple I and II computer and the introduction of GUIs with Lisa and the Macintosh, Ritchie and Thomson were famous for both Unix and C, and during my Linux phase beginning with its appearance in 1992 all through the nineties I never met someone in that community who hadn't at least one book of those guys, mostly "The C programming language.". Only a few other guys were that popular: Donald Knuth, Bjarne Stroustrop, Linus Torvalds and Niklaus Wirth (for Pascal and Modula). And maybe Weizenbaum for Eliza and making us rethink our stance on computer technology whenever the consequences of something new in the IT business became apparent. We invited him once to a conference on data security in Kiel and he gave us a great talk on the ethics of IT engineering.

@@olafschluter706 I like this comment so much I read it twice lol... thanks for the further insight

I've been using C my entire career and I owe it all to him.

​@@olafschluter706 those books from K&R have little snippets from other books. Pretty cool thing.

I felt the same, Jobs was overated

Cars would be another option, you could get a new commuter car for $2000, a Cadillac was about $6000.

Now the computers cost nothing, the software costs nothing, IT professionals are expensive as hell and companies pay so much money in opportunity costs to force people to use Windows in some weird power trip.

The software costs a lot (if it is "enterprise software")

​@@svr5423 The Windows thing is about HR. In most companies regular users outnumber IT by 100:1 and since most applicants only have experiance with Windows it is easier to use Windows then to retrain every new hire. (I know is seems trivial but a lot of worker drones are... a bit slow to figure things out.) This was (and is) a big part of MS strategy when it came to dumping OEM windows into every home-computer on the market. I mean OEM windows licenses have always been dirt cheap, they weren't trying to make much on it directly but they know such market coverage locks in third party software and enterprise customers who then slowly get sucked into a walled garden of exchange servers whatnot that is needed to support all of the Windows nodes. MS also dumps cheap OS licenses on schools and colleges for the same reason.

@@mytech6779 My 85 Macintosh Lisa was ~$5500 brand new, bought by the Art Institute Of Chicago, and was replaced in 1987, where I bought it for a mere $200! Graphics editing was still just starting to get capable, and since they were a well funded institution I guess they wanted the best of the best, and grew out of it pretty darned quick. I guess Apple didn't take the old ones back to refurbish them, and the School could just write them off and give them them to the students, one who resold it at a profit to me!

Ey, as a young kid in this day, I've no doubt I'll feel the same looking back at what histories are written of today. ;p

What were you doing/what do you do now, was it just academia stuffs?

Wow, I always thought PL/1 was an IBM invention for their OS 360 systems. Filling in some gaps in my historical knowledge, which started in 1980.

Multics had a far more advanced and user-friendly shell than UNIX. In fact, some of its features are just beginning to appear on UNIX via non-official shells and shell extensions. Multics command-line supported autocompletion, inline help, and execution confirmation. It also supported random accessible character coordinates on CRT terminals.

As a young guy I find it amazing that OGs like you are still around. It's like you were there when the universe came into existence ...

same lol

μEmacs is The Best! Just ask my old buddy, Linus.

I came here to say this.

That was peak dry humor.

So people like moving the cursor with "hjkl" or "arrows," LOL.

lol great story!

Yes, some of those Bell Labs people had a warped sense of humor! 😀

Cool story bruh. Evidence or it never happened.

@@BrettMonet sure. If you're not a skeptic. Where's the evidence any of this happened? A skeptic would never believe a story like this.

@@hello-cn5nh I can't prove it happened, since the only thing I took from that day was the memory. I worked at AT&T Communications for a few months, then got promoted to Bell Labs, where I was part of the C compiler team that developed the System V Release 4 compiler. I cowrote the link editor (ld), the dynamic linker (that loads shared objects into the kernel) and helped with the development of the original ELF specification that is still used in Linux. While at Bell Labs, I met Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie when they came over to our building (4 miles from Murray Hill) for a noon talk. I also regularly saw Bjarne Stroupstup in the hallway since he came over frequently to consult with the C++ team, although I never had much interaction with him. Believe my story or not, but it happened as I described.

Most people don't realize the colon commands in vim have roots in the early line editors.

There was also ED (pronounced "ee-dee") in linux, but also a simple text editor for DOS namee Ed (pronounced "ed"). Many CS students got the two confused and even thought they might be the same app ported to different OSes. Come to think of it DOS Ed may have come from CP/M! Thank goodness we moved on to "vi and emacs", and the editor wars broke out!😂

@@squirlmy most likely, the first version of MS-DOS was a CP/M clone that Microsoft bought. Gates had initially sent IBM reps to the creators of Dr DOS but the guy refused to sign IBM's NDA's so Bill Gates seized the opportunity the other guy discarded.

​@@adamboggs4745I know few of the letter commands, but having first used Unix via a DECwriter (an upper-case-only output one), I know most of the ed commands, and generally only use them in vim. I know what will happen when I type :g/foo/s//bar/ Plus, using regular expressions makes it more powerful

@@adamboggs4745 I would like to state this even stronger, some vi commands ARE ed commands. Like :1,7 s/foo/bar/

Exactly. Even Microsoft Windows draws from Unix both in terms of philosophy and code. Windows networking code originally came from BSD.

@@roberttbrockway Microsoft only forgot what strong process control meant in the first place :)

I was going to make this comment if no one else did. Far from being on their way out, operating systems based on Unix or Unix-like actually are used in most servers, most mobile devices, and in desktop in the case of MacOS (and a little desktop Linux). Most routers, set top boxes etc. are usually based on Linux. People have been predicting the demise of unices for decades.

Depends on how you define the main concepts of Unix supposedly making up the dominating philosophy of all modern operating systems. NextStep and NT were pioneers of the object oriented approach which you may call central to modern systems. Unix had none of that. Its "philosophy" relied on creating virtual file systems to loosely mimic objects and parsing of output instead of the direct access to objects. Piping made "everything is file/text" an interesting concept, but PowerShell's object piping is even more elegant. You don't have to bother with "everything is file/text" when dealing with macos. Even in the Linux world POSIX utils are being given up as scripting tools for the sake of Python libraries and thus an object oriented approach. Virtual file systems are also becoming somewhat of a dead soil upon which everything is being actualy handeled via D-Bus and udev. Text configs are more and more an auto-generated sham. Some parts of POSIX stay kind of universally relevant, but only until C gets fully replaced by Rust in system programming.

@@eugrusOf course, PowerShell was written by the author of bash.

Yes, and Leia is Luke's sister.

Just before was BeOS, ran on 603e processors. I have an unopened copy..

Technically yes but the kernel name is XNU (X is not Unix) 😂

Posix…not unix.

Android is also Linux kernel based.

However, it wouldn't have gone on to become big if it had been jealously guarded the way all the other systems had been.

Thank God for anti-monopoly laws and governments that actively break up monopolies. We should have more of those.

@TheEvertw The same government: gives legal monopoly over telephone system to AT&T. if Unix were not open, i doubt that it would become so popular.

The same thing is happening right now wlith car electronics systems. Proprietary head to toe.

​@@TheGreatAtariozealot=/=jealous

All those playstations as well.

​@@renaissancechambaraevery thing that's not windows is probably linux

@@metamorphis7reeeeeeeeeeeee os2 and BeOS and qnx exist

​@@renaissancechambaratoo bad more and more of the internet is being centralized into just, facebook

​@@cc-dtvno one care about facebook

I had always wondered why ATT practically gave away Unix, initially not even copyrighting it, to Universities. I hadn't been aware of the consent decree, but that explains it pretty well.

Back when antitrust was still taken seriously, the public reaped the benefit. There's a lesson here for today.

The funny thing about this "anti-trust" agreement is that it was practically the reverse: the government gave a monopoly to AT&T in exchange for giving up something no one really valued.

@@vulpo Bell Labs also basically gave away the transistor.

It's a shame that the Government didn't break Microsoft up for their antitrust violations. They should have separated Microsoft into three separate businesses. OS, Networking and Applications. MS ability to embed and interlock all three facets of computing gave them massive power to manipulate the market for personal and later business computing. We're still suffering the consequences of that failure of our government to understand technology and be swayed by lobbying technocrats.

Ehhhhh.... I didn't care for it. A lot of the technical detail was kinda confused. It felt like someone talking about cars that isn't really into cars if you know what I mean.

Congratulations on posting the first comment, dated two months before the video was published on RU-vid!

Saw that too.. strange@@cdl0

@@cdl0 how is this even possible

@@Finito54ify sponsoring the channel? Patreon or smting.

Patreon members get early access

BCPL - Ugh! Everything in the Amiga operating system was written in 'C', EXCEPT for the Disk Operating System, which was written in BCPL. This was because Commodore couldn't finish their planned DOS in time, so they bolted on a port of Metacomco TRIPOS, which was written in BCPL. It was difficult to get the two brain-halves to communicate, as they could not share Structs.

There are *nix wars today. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Android, Chrome OS. Did I missed something?

The OG wars of BSD vs SysV and the later SCO shenanigans against Linux.

@@norbert.kiszka the UNIX war of today is GNU / Linux versus everyone else, but mostly the last two standing, FreeBSD and illumos. Yes yes, NetBSD and OpenBSD still exist, but they are niche within a niche. I am happy that GNU / Linux is, slowly but steadily, losing its grip on the IT industry in favor of FreeBSD and especially illumos.

dude is obsessed with body parts

Don't overlook Minix (Mini-unix) from late 1980's and Linux from the early 1990's as microchips started to reach the masses.

Except that -Linux became much more influential in the 90s, particularly on internet servers. And Android came from a specific Linux distro(Gentoo?), not directly from Unix or any other similar systems (like BSD). Yes this could smoothly transition into the story of linux, but the stories of copyright Unix, Sun OS and BSD, even Xenix and Minix, are distinct stories of their own, and a decision whether to follow those other lineages would need to be made. And also how much would be dedicated to "Free Software" and "Open Source", as opposed to the more technical Operating System stories.

Even MacOS/iOS is basically BSD derived.

Yes, although the discussion about Android could demonstrate that while the *ux kernel is totally robust and versatile, from a user point of view the underlying Linux structure is totally insignificant and even worthless. Heck, my Android is so closed I can't even get my primary and most powerful tool, a shell.

As a former Java developer I am painfully aware of Sun’s existence

Thats because Oracle destroyed a good thing like all other tech billionaires.

@@user-oj7uc8tw9r I was a Sun for 20 years and sadly, in some ways, Sun destroyed itself first. Oracle just twisted the knife.

I worked at Sun for 20 years. When we were on the rise, it was an amazing place to work. You'll never see anything like that again.

Bill Joy is a certifiable genius.

Or at least the kernel and the base utilities were originally written in ASM. The rewrite in C was a stroke of genius.

@@n7ekg MSDOS 2.1 was written in ASM. MSDOS 3.0 was written in C. It did not help.

@@AllenMorris3 3.11 was... "ok"

Thanks for sharing!

I think you can confirm what I think is urban legend. The Tandem owner was showcasing the Tandem Nonstop and shot at the computer with a gun and it kept working. Myth or True?

I was there, Galdalf, 3000 years ago....

Very jealous!

Where I work there's a bell labs facility down the road , it's still open they work on cell phone tower equipment there . A few of my customers were engineers there for years .

I'm sure that Cray 1 would've been a great toy to tinker with!

It already is, Android is built on Linux.

Statistically speaking, Windows is on a slow death curve; as Android, iOS, MacOS, datacenter Linux, and academic Chromebooks slowly increase their domination. All office-suites now firmly in the cloud, video games are the last good reason to run Windows.

Not really in the way that most Linux users like, but Linux already has conquered the computer world. 80% of phone users use Android, an overwhelming amount of smart TVs run Android or another Linux-based OS, many schools are now using Chromebooks and an overwhelming amount of web servers run Linux. The only common device that doesn't is the PC, in which OS usage is largely superficial, basically a tool to use the web browser.

​@@truejimAnd even gaming is becoming less attractive for Windows with the advent of Proton. Windows is on life support, Linux just needs hardware with it preinstalled to reach out to normies

@@mgord9518 And Visual Basic was once the worlds most dominant programming environment. Linux is very popular at the moment but I wouldn't say conquered. Much of that popularity is under the covers embedded within a device or serving web pages. Not recognized by users. Very easily replaced in the future by the next hot mess. BTW, Apple products are certainly common devices and they don't run Linux.

Odd. My opinion is that the command line interface to Unix is very poorly designed from a human factors standpoint.

its designed for programmers not humans@@GH-oi2jf

While other engineers in my profession struggled to learn the massive language Perl, I used a handful of Unix utilities strung together with pipes and committed to shell scripts. I could test and debug any utility I needed in usually less than 20 minutes while they were still fishing for the 6-inch thick Perl documentation. I never needed to learn Perl and never have. I am learning Python, just to keep current.

Reliable too. My work machines are Debian and OSX, I game on Windows.

Yes. And everything works pretty much the same, from your raspberry pi HTPC over your mac laptop to the server in the company. Linux is for lazy people :)

@@svr5423 Yep. We like getting stuff done rather than reinstalling Windows. Again.

Mac os will never be able to do mission critical like a real UNIX unless you want another chernobyl.

@@Teluric2 Maybe not, but for most productivity tasks Mac OS blows Windows out of the water. I’m a writer, and no writer I know who runs Mac has lost work. The Windows based writers do have issues this way, not all but enough that there’s no damned way I’d trust Windows for anything other than gaming.

Decade of the 70s huh? So how many boxes of cards did you go through? lol In just 3 semesters of Fortran and COBOL I went through I cannot remember how many boxes of cards. Did you ever write programs to play tricks on the guys running the computer?

Yup. You had to have a bit of brainpower to be able to use a computer.

Your first sentence might require editing, as I think it does not reflect what you want to state. :wq

@@jlinkels thanks! Will be ready for the next update 😂 :w!

It took me awhile to understand why I kept coming back to vi: built-in regex support on the command and simple searching. Very efficient. What's funny to me is that everyone I worked with knows a slightly different subset of vi commands. (TAMTOWTDI, as in Perl.)

I also remember EMACS. How did that fit in?

​@@davidcarson4421emacs was to replace vi, for easier usage and more options, and it was extensible. It is still popular in some areas, but to be honest, notepad++ is a worthy replacement. Emacs was also kind of an os in itself, you could do your email in emacs, ftp, debug c programs, etc. I once ported micro-emacs to a vax vms system because it did not have a decent editor. Today, we remember emacs as the start of the big wave of public domain open source applications and the copyleft licence

Unix was the first *portable* operating system, and it was portable because the implementation language lent itself to portability.

@@JonathanMaddoxit was written in C. I still have C language manual in my home somewhere. Also, I still have Unix V manual too. Yes, I’m dating myself.

@@frankchan4272 What is so odd about that? I code in C nearly every day.

Exactly, MacOS is 100% POSIX compliant (in essence, UNIX) and it’s the #1 preferred OS for development out there today.

@@AdamPippert it's kind of a weird unix, though. super nice for developing web stuff, or remoting to linux boxen

..including in Android phones.

​@@AdamPippertlol no

It's at most a nice unified development environment that can be emulated on Windows and Mac

I once wrote an Ethernet driver for SCO Unix running on a 80386. It worked flawlessly at an exhibition the following week.

SCO was trashed by Gates, the demon who started life wrecking computing before moving onto people.

same, I recall something about them going after IBM, then some government "National Laboratories" for using Linux on some experimental supercomputers (o_O), then silence. I recall looking around to see what happened with the IBM case few years later, and I guess it was "compounded" by System V vs BSD code-sharing mess that goes way back to the dawn of pain. As for the rest, well, SCO Group mobility and Unix software assets were sold off in 2011, guess no one wanted anything to do with their alleged patent-troll lawsuit shenanigans. SCO was Renamed to The TSG Group then Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2012. reads like a book/movie on how to burn your name and reputation instantly.

So you support fascism...

That's like what - half a million now? Crazy. For less computing power than an Alexa puck. To share among a whole company.

macos is basically freebsd with an apple userland, altho nearly all of the basic freebsd commands/services are still present so it is mostly quite easy to port apps to it from other unix versions

Encore was started by Ken Fisher, Gordon Bell, and Henry Burkhardt, (prime, dec and data general respectively). They wanted to buy a number of startups and release a family of products simultaneously. Add “resolution”, a multi processor workstation, and a software company cant recall the name). Encore would cover all mfg and service, with the subs being independent.

Encore went public before shipping any systems, raised 27mill IIRC.

Fascinating! It sounds like this work ought to be more widely known. The CPU choices were a bit unfortunate, given the way everything played out, though.

Great to hear. *nix skills will do you well in IT. FWIW, I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years and Unix for a bit longer than that.

After I spent some time working with z/OS and its so-called "data set" - which is essentially a file that contains one or more records - I finally understood why the invention of the concept of "files" was so revolutionary. Computing before UNIX is so... weird, is all that I can say.

"Creating files is so easy in UNIX systems that the only standard shared by all of them is the System Administrator's MOTD telling users to clean up their files."

@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 Dataset is IBM speak. It predates Unix.

Programming in assembly is tedious, and is rarely rewarding.

@@lfrankow Quite right, except that the "in assembly" part is redundant.

Yes, this was my issue with it as well. Falling how. Linux is EVERYWHERE.

@@don_n5skt Absolutely. And of the remainder, a significant portion is Apple products, which all run UNIXey OSes. (Heck, even some Apple _accessories,_ like the Lightning to HDMI adapter, actually have a stripped-down version of the XNU kernel used in iOS!) And in the case of macOS, it’s literally UNIX certified, so it’s not just UNIX-like, it _is_ officially a UNIX.

That was my first reaction - "But ... the descendants of UNIX lierally run the world!"

Well, NO phones or tablets use copyrighted Unix!!! While Linux distros (including Android with a Linux kernel) run all those things, the Open Source Linux kernel makes all of those distinct from Unix. In that sense, Unix is pretty much dead. If you want to include BSDs and other Uni alike OSes, you could call them un*x, but that essential feature of Open Source/Libre code makes that quite distinct!!!

@@squirlmy macOS, HP-UX, and AIX are all certified “real” UNIX. iOS doesn’t have the certification, but is extremely closely related under the hood. Regardless, I said “UNIX or UNIX-like”, the latter encompassing Linux and Android.

I had to use a Sun workstation at one time in my career. Their mantra was “the network is the computer.” What that meant was that persons on other workstations could do things to mess with your workstation as a practical joke, and that did happen. I did like two things about it. It used “Life” as a screen saver, which was a good choice. It had a chess program which I found possible to beat, occasionally, so just hard enough to be challenging, not too hard to be pointless playing it.

@@GH-oi2jf That mantra was stolen from DEC. DEC's minicomputers did WAN and LAN networking long before Sun even existed. And then there is VMS clustering, never equalled.

We had 4 Sun workstations shared between a dozen developers. When a colleague got a new job I told him that "it wasn't so much like losing a colleague as gaining a Sun".

Microsoft? I think you mean DEC and VMS.

​​@@tracyrreedAh ok so it's a VMS carry over that Cutler and his team did. That makes sense since they all came from DEC and would use similar nomenclature.

Exacly that. The CPUs sees only the virtual address space. Swap is just a region of a block device that is mapped into the virtual address space. Whenever data is accessed, a page fault occurs, prompting the memory management to copy the data from block storage into the actual physical memory. Swap space is generally not needed*, it's basically and very slow cheap memory - sometimes people don't want to pay for RAM, sometimes you cannot install more. I also never understood why some OS or applications insist on having swap. It is usually never explained. Other useful mechanism to safe memory are memory overcommit (software developers tend to allocate huge amounts of memory they never use), memory compression and memory deduplication (available on select hardware plattforms, does great with plenty of similar workloads and small memory pages). * there are a few platform dependent exceptions. E.g. part of the kernel dump mechanism, or linux uses the swap mechanism to compress memory into a ramdisk. Edit: Fun fact: 32bit x86 could address more than 4GB total with the PAE feature. If you use Microsoft, you had to pay an extra license (usually a more expensive version of the OS) to use it. Software developers, especially those who clinged to 32bit binaries in the 64bit era, were often totally inept in using more than 4GB of RAM by spawning multiple processes and using IPC mechanism to shift data around. They often spectacularly went OOM instead. Edit: Fun fact 2: If you have Windows and an nVidia GPU, the OS maps the VRAM into the virtual address space WITHOUT increasing it's size. So the total VM available is less than the physical RAM + VRAM, leading to OOM situations when the GPU's VRAM is full, even when physical RAM is available. This is one of the cases where you might add Swap as a hack to increase the VM size in modern windows.

Um, Apple.......

@@TheOwlGuy777 If you mean that Unix wouldn't be a footnote because of Apple - I say ehh. By the time OSX came out in 2001 the tech field already knew what Unix was and Linux was already well established by that point. The rest of the Unix world was going nowhere compared to what was going on in the Windows world (except MAYBE IBM but only because they had the install base). Sun was perpetually on life support, HP-UX was hot garbage, Cray and SGI were niche.

@@TheOwlGuy777 Despite NextStep's Unix heritage, most of OSX's SUS (Single Unix Specification) compliance, actually comes from FreeBSD code. If it weren't for FreeBSD, I highly doubt Apple would have put the necessary time, effort, or money into achieving Unix compliance without it. So, the OP's comment is still quite accurate even if you want to include Apple, which their products are technically Unix, but it's really more of a side note.

​@@TheOwlGuy777Were it not for the massive success of Linux by that time, Apple likely would never have looked at a Unix anyway. They only chose BSD because they could keep it proprietary.

And Linux STILL isn't ready for prime time, yet Apple is mainstream.

Fake News...

Maybe episode 7 of this series will feature ifdef hell.