On Sun, May 10, 1998 at 01:26:18PM -0500, Michael A. Stone wrote:
> >And UNIX <g>
>
> time-sliced multitasking, multiuser, multiprocessing, multiprogramming.
> it's an OS designed for machines that sit in a closet somewhere and have
> umpty-odd users logged in from remote terminals at any given moment. it
> was, itself, a brutally stripped-down version of a large and almost
> literally bulletproof OS developed for the military, called Multics.
Actually, Unix was designed from scratch by people (dmr, kt, bwk) who
were very well aware of Multics and who knowingly borrowed many ideas
from it. Their goal was to create a "programmer's workbench" -- in fact,
the PWB Unix 2.0 release enjoyed a very long life with various parts
of AT&T serving just that role.
Anyway, they were *not* trying to create a general-purpose OS, but to
create an environment which would allow for what we'd call today "rapid
prototyping": the ability to quickly craft a working mock-up of an
application for proof-of-concept before really sitting down to develop
the whole thing. That's why there are so many utilities - sed, awk,
sort, uniq, diff, etc.; and why things like make and m4 were written.
(Much of the early criticism of Unix was that it was 'user-unfriendly'.
Of *course* it was, it was designed to be friendly to programmers,
not to end users. It was like criticizing a Formula 1 race car for
having a stickshift.)
But as it turns out, they did such a good job writing a cleanly-layered
and portable OS whose parts could be interchanged, that Unix became
the experimental platform of choice for a lot of people. Realtime
versions like DMERT (inside AT&T) and Masscomp Unix (I forget their
product name for it; but it was optimized for data acquisistion and
thus handled real-time interrupts) came along. Meanwhile, the Berkeley
boys were first porting it to a new architecture called the VAX and
then gluing TCP/IP into it. By the early 80's, a lot of places had
thrown out their RSTS tapes and loaded AT&T V7 on their PDP-11 machines,
and thrown out their VMS tapes and loaded BSD Unix on their Vaxen.
People were already experimenting with multiple processors (Purdue Dual-CPU
Vax, ~1980) and by the mid-80's, Sequent was shipping production-ready
16-processor systems. Also by then Sun, whose window into the market
was created DEC's complete failure to acknowledge that Unix blew the
doors off VMS, was just about to switch to the Sun-3 series, which was
when their fortunes really took off. Other projects came along (Mach) that
kept the outer layers (shell, utilities) but replaced the kernel.
Still other folks experimented with Mac-like user interfaces to replace
the shell; and others ported it to everything from Z80's to Cray
supercomputers.
And so it goes. What's happening now with Linux is a mirror of what
happened in the early 80's. Just as that revolution overthrew a
dominant vendor (DEC), it's my fervent hope that this one will trash
a dominant (and, I might add, highly unethical if not downright evil)
vendor (Microsoft).
For further info, I recommend Don Libes' "Life With Unix" (and not just
because I'm mentioned in it, either!), and if you can find it, the Bell Labs
Technical Journal special issue of July-August 1978 is entirely devoted
to Unix -- it makes fascinating reading.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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