40 Years of Unix

[r_manic]

The Unix legacy

Regardless of the ultimate fate of Unix, the operating system born at Bell Labs 40 years ago has established a legacy likely to endure for decades more. It can claim parentage of a long list of popular software, including the Unix offerings of IBM, HP and Sun, Apple's Mac OS X and Linux. It has also influenced systems with few direct roots in Unix, such as Microsoft's Windows NT and the IBM and Microsoft versions of DOS.

Unix enabled a number of startup companies to succeed by giving them a low-cost platform to build on. It was a core building block for the Internet and is at the heart of telecommunications systems today. It spawned a number of important architectural ideas such as pipelining, and the Unix derivative Mach contributed enormously to scientific, distributed and multiprocessor computing.

The ACM may have said it best in its 1983 Turing award citation in honor of Thompson and Ritchie's Unix work: "The genius of the Unix system is its framework, which enables programmers to stand on the work of others."

Source

Is this like modern guitarists still relying on the classic framework of the six-string guitar or something?

 

[audiovoodoo]

Windows NT actually has more in common with VMS than Unix. The lead developer was the guy that wrote VMS. He joked it was one better than VMS, think about that for a second, he gave us WNT.

 

[linux_0]

lol

I'll take any Unix OS over any OS from Redmond any day.

 

[audiovoodoo]

Even Xenix? [/Now that should leave a few of them scratching their heads ]

 

[linux_0]

:lol:

Almost any Unix

Although Xenix hasn't had a release since 1989 and was sold to the company everyone loves to hate after M$..... SCO.

You probably knew that since you are somewhat familiar with SCO.

 

[audiovoodoo]

Yeah.. but you would never had had Sys V R4 without it. As much as I hate them a lot of the *nix crowd seem to forget just how much involvement MS had in the adoption and evolution (I avoided saying development there for a reason!) of Unix.

And seeing as the smart kids might have guessed from your comment.. I remember one of the PR guys at SCO sending out a mail about how MS ran their DNS on an open server box at the time. I had to point out a few things to him... such as the huge stake MS held in SCO at the time and the fact SCO licensed the code from MS in the first place. Hmmm... Wonder why they awarded me with a sheet of Sandpaper as the 'Stanley tools award for abrasive communication' at the spoof awards do that year