UNIX turns 40
Thanks to TYD for pointing out this article by Mark Ward:
The computer world is notorious for its obsession with what is new – largely thanks to the relentless engine of Moore’s Law that endlessly presents programmers with more powerful machines.
Given such permanent change, anything that survives for more than one generation of processors deserves a nod.
Think then what the Unix operating system deserves because in August 2009, it celebrates its 40th anniversary. And it has been in use every year of those four decades and today is getting more attention than ever before.
Work on Unix began at Bell Labs after AT&T, (which owned the lab), MIT and GE pulled the plug on an ambitious project to create an operating system called Multics.
The idea was to make better use of the resources of mainframe computers and have them serve many people at the same time.
“With Multics they tried to have a much more versatile and flexible operating system, and it failed miserably,” said Dr Peter Salus, author of the definitive history of Unix’s early years.
The cancellation meant that two of the researchers assigned to the project, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, had a lot of time on their hands. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims of making computers more flexible and interactive, they decided to try and finish the work – albeit on a much smaller scale.
The commitment was helped by the fact that in August 1969, Ken Thompson’s wife took their new baby to see relatives on the West Coast. She was due to be gone for a month and Thompson decided to use his time constructively – by writing the core of what became Unix.
He allocated one week each to the four core components of operating system, shell, editor and assembler. It was during that time and after as the growing team got the operating system running on a DEC computer known as a PDP-7 that Unix came into being.
By the early 1970s, five people were working on Unix. Thompson and Ritchie had been joined by Brian Kernighan, Doug McIlroy and Joe Ossanna.
The name was reportedly coined by Brian Kernighan – a lover of puns who wanted Unics to stand in contrast to its forebear Multics.
The team got Unix running well on the PDP7 and soon it had a long list of commands it could carry out. The syntax of many of those commands, such as chdir and cat, are still in use 40 years on. Along with it came the C programming language.
But, said Dr Salus, it wasn’t just the programming that was important about Unix – the philosophy behind it was vital too…
