@Full_marx A vintage DEC PDP-7, I believe a similar model was the first machine to ever run #Unix.
A little paper punched tape at foreground by the console.
@Full_marx Yeah, my memory was correct! :smile:
"Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were the programmers at the Bell Labs computing and research department who worked on project MULTICS from start to end. Thompson found an old PDP-7 machine, and developed his own application programs and operating system from scratch, aided by Ritchie and others. This operating system was renamed UNIX.
In November 1971, the first version of UNIX was released along with a book called ‘The UNIX Programmers Manual’. This was the systematic development approach at that time – a product would be released with proper documentation so that researchers could read the manual and look at the OS details."
And from Wikipedia :
"Ken Thompson, a programmer in the Labs' computing research department, had worked on Multics. He decided to write his own operating system. While he still had access to the Multics environment, he wrote simulations for the new file and paging system[clarification needed] on it. He also programmed a game called Space Travel, but it needed a more efficient and less expensive machine to run on, and eventually he found a little-used Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7 at Bell Labs.[4][5] On the PDP-7, in 1969, a team of Bell Labs researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie, including Rudd Canaday, implemented a hierarchical file system, the concepts of computer processes and device files, a command-line interpreter, and some small utility programs, modeled on the corresponding features in Multics, but simplified.[3] The resulting system, much smaller and simpler than Multics, was to become Unix. In about a month's time, in August 1969, Thompson had implemented a self-hosting operating system with an assembler, editor and shell, using a GECOS machine for bootstrapping.[6] "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix
@smj@mastodon.sdf.org
Very long post!
@Full_marx
I think the robustness of Unix goes back to its roots, being developed by people working into smaller teams, concerned with getting the best possible performance.
They did Multi user systems back when the machine was less powerful than a low end cell phone today. And it worked.
It was refined over the years and got new functions, people built tools for functions they wanted, the users themselves were programmers, scientists, IT people, sys admins.
IBM did a nice job with OS/2, I was a user and supporter of that, remember buying a shrink wrapped copy of OS/2 Warp, version 3.0, in 1995 - just after seeing a leaked copy of Windows 95, coming out at the time, on a friend's home. (I wasn't too impressed)
IBM had contracts with MS since the early days of the PC, MS made itself after they got the contract to provide the op system for the new IBM PC, that was going to come out in 1981.
MS later worked in OS/2 as well, but at one point they decided to support their own in-house GUI environment. At first, Windows versions 1.0 to 3.11, which ran on top of the DOS opsystem. When Win95 came out, it was much more refined, technically, without an underlying DOS hidden by a pretty GUI.
Windows NT was really New Technology, the initials making up the name NT. It was a lot nicer and more sophisticated than W95, they had people working on development who came from DEC and other larger places.
I am very fond of NT Workstation v 4.0, loved it. Probably still have a memorable full screen shot of a newly installed machine, logged in and using only --- 18 MegaBytes of RAM. Yes, 18.
At the time when RAM was still expensive, a 32 MB machine was power user, a 64 MB one Leet. 😃
But both MS's and IBM's op systems were developed for single user, desktop machines, with different priorities than Unix.
Unix lives on, it's the beating heart on which Linux is based. Although Linux has been written from scratch to avoid infringing on ATT's copyrights, the whole architecture came from there, the tools made in the past are still around, the CLI is alive and well.
When I first used the Internet, in 1994 when I returned to Uni and got an academic account, you could not find consumer access. The only people having it were either in academia, or on larger business or government.
All the tools I learned to use to explore this new fangled network were command line.
I was one of the many users, with a home in a Silicon Graphics machine. Ours was called Sandcastle.
We had Irix running, and did ftp, email, text editing, maybe even a Gopher session to see other systems, still all text based and I accessed it mostly from home via modem dial in connection.
I was thrilled to find a system in Colorado that offered free Unix shell accounts, made myself a home there, and was able to have an email address and other perks even before I got official local uni student account (I dialed in and logged in with a friends account, then used telnet into the Colorado system to login there.)
I think that system might still be around, it was called Nyx10.
Yesm they are! https://nyx10.nyx.net/newacct.html
I remember the first time I used a WEb browser, at home, on my fast for the time 386 40 MHz computer. Via dial up, with Netscape pre version 1.0, probably, and it took forever to load a page.
Being used to command line use, I found that too slow, although it made things a lot easier.
Back in the days, you needed an education to be able to use the system and those tools. It wasn't made for the masses.
The WWW idea really simplified things a lot, and once access became easier to buy, and machines got more and more memory and processor power, it turned into a nice way to use networks resources.
@smj@mastodon.sdf.org
@design_RG @smj@mastodon.sdf.org
I wanna understand what makes Unix so much more less vulnerable than windows - OS/2 or NT.
I mean microsoft spent decades trying to refine and build something to the level of Unix (something that was created on a piece of paper and a machine that sounded like a refrigerator)
I mean the only reason Unix lost consumer popularity was because it got hidden away after the break up of At&t.
Right?