Wow. I have to say that it is funny how you hear the legendary tales of computing history over and over again and then some little crucial minor details like "we sold the CEO's office on it" eventually slip out.
Ok, that was important at AT&T, but not really why Unix currently rules the universe. Due to anti-trust settlements and cheap licensing, and copyright foibles, Unix was the cheap midrange choice for students and non-enterprise users. After a lot of pain, Unix eventually evolved into an "open standard". And that eventually evolved into an "open source" standard with Linux (and BSD, MacOS, etc.) To quote DEC's Ken Olsen[1]:
> [UNIX is] great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it’s great for interchanging programs between different machines. ... It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They’ll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
And that is why your cell phone runs Unix and not VMS.
> And that is why your cell phone runs Unix and not VMS.
While this is unquestioningly accepted by the software and at large communities, for some reason "low-end manufacturing" in the US and the rest of the developed world is exempt from this logic. Somehow, we'll dispense with this pesky manufacturing economic sector, and when someone wants a "real" high-end manufactured system/product, they will end up purchasing it from these same developed world economies. We're VMS'ing ourselves to our detriment, and the developing nations are laughing all the way to the bank.
There is so much embedded knowledge that I've seen played out over and over again in different economic sectors in my paths consulting across different industries that I no longer buy this line of argument. Anyone who believes this must first prove to the disinterested observer/reader that the "low-end" they say is no longer needed is hermetically packaged to automation levels with no loss of institutional knowledge on all fronts of quality, step-wise improvements leading to innovations, environmental impact, etc.,..., in which case, we should simply automate it ourselves and retain the embedded wealth represented in that knowledge.
Stakeholders won't do this, very nearly ever. They'd rather go down with the ship than preserve the gnosis in a rigorous manner. People believe their only path is to charge rents to the company on pitiful subsets of the overall gnosis, as the firm experiences a slow decay in orbit.
And what if the gnosis is essentially wrong? It usually is; it's just not wrong enough to kill the firm outright. Humans consider themselves to be parasites when they can.
"...and it’s great for interchanging programs between different machines..."
This is like saying "DNA is great for interchanging phenotypes between different locations".
I think that the missing piece as to why it's universal is that Linux was better than DOS, not VMS. You kind-of, sort-of had to have a VAX to run VMS. Your desktop 386 could run SCO.
It's ... useable ( but of low useability ) so the Windows API doomed Linux to success.
VMS had early support for clustering and associated technologies like shared filesystems with a distributed lock manager.
VMS had amazing support for terminal servers, so that each terminal user could choose among several connected computers. Terminal I/O was almost completely offloaded: it was common for other users to get delays and random short freezes, but VMS terminal users had smooth responsive I/O all the time.
DEC mandated the Common Language Environment, something like the C library calling convention but much better thought out and specified. It was totally normal to write an application in two or three languages because you felt that each language had advantages for that part. Every compiler and interpreter knew how to call functions from the CLE and export their own.
> VMS terminal users had smooth responsive I/O all the time.
I recall that you could press Ctrl-T and it would instantly echo back some useful information about the running process, like CPU time and page faults. That was a nifty feature.
I loved VMS. Everything was so coherent, whereas Unix looked like it was hacked together overnight by a bunch of people who never talked to each other. These days, I like Unix, but back in the 80s, I only tolerated it.
I was 'exiled' to VMS for a couple of years, though a very nice system there was lots more typing on VMS's command line. Anyway I think it was scaling and software that allowed UNIX take over. I had a useful UNIX on a 8086 and software could be found. On VMS just about any useful programs cost $, never mind support costs for using VMS.
I really liked the VMS help system; it was hierarchical and you could start at the top and learn pretty much everything about the system by just navigating the help system. This was far better than man pages (which are mainly references for when you already know what to do).
VMS had early clustering technology, but that got added to TruCluster.
In VMS, revision control was built into the file system. It was easy to retrieve older versions of files. Unix didn't have anything like that until rcs was invented, and even then it was a tool, not something built in like what VMS had.
Brings back memories. If I recall correctly, when you had this turned on, files would get a hidden extension of .1 .2 .3 etc. And you could specify how many revisions to keep around? I also recall on our system, most of the time this was turned off because disk space was so precious. But I do recall this feature saving my bacon a time or two...
Yep! It goes up to 32k by default, but you can limit it:
"The /VERSION_LIMIT qualifier for the CREATE/DIRECTORY, SET DIRECTORY, and SET FILE commands lets you control the number of versions of a file. If you exceed the version limit, the system automatically purges the lowest version file in excess of the limit. For example, if the version limit is 5 and you create the sixth version of a file (ACCOUNTS.DAT;6), the system deletes the first version of the file (ACCOUNTS.DAT;1). To view the version limit on a file, enter the DIRECTORY/FULL command. The version limit is listed in the File attributes: field."
I thoroughly enjoyed using DCL (Digital Command Line -- the VMS shell) and VMS (with the wall of documentation, like http://www.pkl.net/~matt/photos/machines/tn/pict0157.jpg.htm...). It always felt structured and orderly, unlike UNIX systems, which are more "organic". :) (I love UNIX too!)
The original MacOS was also supposed to copy this revision capability -- imagine, built in document versioning. Versioning was surfaced in the API but apparently never implemented. Had to always be set to 0 (1? long time ago).
It's been a long time since I've used VMS, but one neat feature I recall was sort of a system/group/user concept of environment variables. For example if you set an environment variable at the system level, the new value would immediately be reflected for all users. Powerful concept.
You are thinking of VMS logicals. Of course they can be used for more than just environment variables! They can also be used to provide an extra level of indirection to filenames. Neat stuff!
I forgot about that. Was an interesting concept. Question, how can one tell if a UN*X newbee came from VMS ? You get a question from them "How to I change an environment variable for the parent process ?" :) That was allowed in VMS but forgot which type of VMS variable that was.
Although I too was initially expecting a tale about how UNIX came to rule the world, I think "top" in the article's title instead means the top of Bell Labs/AT&T.
> It didn't seem like a very good idea for us to be keeping records from
> the inner sanctum of the corporation on a computer where most everybody
> had super-user privileges. A call to the PR guy convinced him of the
> wisdom of keeping such things on their own premises. And so the CEO's
> office bought a Unix system.
... and this is exactly how it works today with SaaS subscriptions, except root-privileged people don't even work at the same company and (frequently) aren't as capable as the folks at Bell Labs.
I think something like sandstorm is a good balance between this though. Easy enough to setup and you can use whatever cloud software available for it. The feel of shared-hosting, but the control of self-hosting, all in one easy to use package.
It's how we generate most of our revenue (Userify). Turns out that most people aren't comfortable trusting a third party for their SSH key management (even public keys).
Well, the meaningful way for UNIX (and Linux) to succeed as a popular product, according to the aspirations of its proponents, was on the desktop. It wasn't just about the server side back then (late 90s, early 00s) it was all about taking over Windows.
If somebody uses some hardware product (e.g. set top box) and doesn't know its Linux, then it's no big win for the Linux community.
And it's not just necessarily that users don't realize it's there because "it just works", either.
The set top box, for example, can be buggy or crappy but just not provide neither a way to dive in and fix it, nor branding related to Linux.
If somebody uses some hardware product (e.g. set top box) and doesn't know its Linux, then it's no big win for the Linux community.
I have to disagree there. It may not be a marketing win, but that doesn't mean that there are no other benefits. The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us; whether Johnny knows that his games are running on a daemonic operating system is of very little relevance.
>The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us
Is there a writeup of this anywhere? If stuff has been backported/upstreamed/whatever from the PS4 to the freeBSD kernel that would truly be living the dream!
The fact that the PS4 runs FreeBSD has been written about extensively. The contributions they've made, less so... mainly because most of the work they did was before they announced that they were using FreeBSD, and they went to significant lengths to avoid that information leaking out (e.g., shell companies were set up so that code could be contributed without revealing the ultimate source).
Probably the most easily identifiable contributions are in LLVM; Sony is one of the largest contributors to that project, and it's entirely due to the PS4.
The only successful desktop UNIX derivative is MacOS. That ship has sailed.
However the most relevant computing devices for consumers are phones and tablets nowadays, not desktops. UNIX derivatives run almost all of them. Big success, I'd say.
UNIX derivatives are running most servers too and are making inroads into the Windows desktop. The outlook is good unless a new popular market suddenly open with no meaningful *nix presence in it.
Chromebooks are very successful, outselling MacOS desktops in 2016. They run a pretty standard Linux environment.
I don't think anyone thought Linux to take over the office desktop by mass porting office applications but by moving them to the web. That shift is still happening.
>Chromebooks are very successful, outselling MacOS desktops in 2016.
That's still products from multiple vendors (Dell, HP, and Lenovo, Asus?, etc) narrowingly beating sales from a single vendor.
And that (a) in a year when the single vendor had stalled updating their product line, and (b) with the Chromebooks being much cheaper, and more mass market, offerings.
So this speaks more to the slow sales of Chromebooks during the previous years than some major breakthrough.
You're right, according to the the US stats I saw. I probably forgot about them because I never saw one (Italy here) or if I saw them I mistaken them for a Windows laptop. However I think I never heard the word Chromebook in a conversation, either work or friends. We could use a Chromebook everywhere we're connecting to the Internet with our laptops but apparently we're not.
It would be a bigger win if the success of Linux on mobile wasn't built on a heaping pile of GPL violations. It's all well and good that my phone runs Linux, but if I don't have Stallman's Four Freedoms on it and the device drivers aren't contributed back, what exactly is the point?
As for desktops, the market share still slowly creeps up. Desktop Linux has definitely graduated from "uber-nerd" to "power user" territory. Plenty of people I know who aren't particularly into Free Software, UNIX etc dual-boot Ubuntu.
> The name UNIX is just not well defined. Saying Linux is a UNIX is perfectly valid imo, but everyone has a different idea of what UNIX means.
The trademark UNIX® and its specification is (still) tightly controlled[1] and licensing and compliance was far too expensive for Linus to think about it for his tiny Linux-like OS. (A Linux distribution did recently get certified as UNIX® but that's a recent exception.)
There have been multiple lawsuits between different companies about what could be considered UNIX. The original Linux distribution was basically GNU (GNU is NOT UNIX) utilities wrapped around a deliberately non-UNIX kernel called Linux.
Back when people were trying to explain Linux to UNIX users, it was called "UNIX-like" or a UNIX® clone. Now that Linux has clearly eclipsed UNIX, even now no one really calls Linux, "UNIX" or vice-versa. They are very similar but they are different.
There is also another specification called POSIX. Even Windows NT had a POSIX-compliant layer for a while, and Services for UNIX had some licensed IP, but no one would claim that Windows NT was UNIX.
See also Lisivka's comments [2] further down: Linux is not UNIX.
The SUS is irrelevant to this question, just like POSIX, which you mention yourself. Probably not a single version of UNIX from Bell Labs could be called UNIX by these definitions, which is silly. Of course they are UNIX, more so than any other operating system. So what makes an operating system a UNIX? Decide for yourself! UNIX != UNIX®
I think Linux is perfectly UNIX in terms of userland and 'spirit', if you will. It's not UNIX officially, but that's because nobody bothered to pay for the licensing, since it's not worth it, not because it couldn't get certified as UNIX if somebody wanted to do it - in fact D. Ritchie himself said:
"I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as the more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers."
K. Thompson is also using Linux. I think that's the ultimate testament to it being 'Unix', unless you want the trademark for marketing purposes, like Apple does.
As per[1], "According to a 2009 interview, Thompson now uses a Linux-based operating system." He probably uses multiple systems, including macOS in some capacity, am sure, but it looks like he uses/used Linux.
I can't find the source right now but Russ Cox posted to some newsgroup or mailing list that most golang developers use OS X these days (rsc, rob and ken for sure).
Am I the only one who doesn't really consider that a shame? As a happy Linux desktop user here (considering switching to FreeBSD but switching is intimidating :|), I don't really care that much what other people use.
Linux is not UNIX. GNU/Linux is POSIX (common standard for UNIX'es) compatible, so it is UNIX compatible. Android/Linux is not POSIX compatible, however compatible library can be installed to Android/Linux to make it POSIX compatible, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27604455/is-android-posix... .
Linux distributions are often not POSIX-compatible out of the box either, at user level. Typically some commands are missing due to insufficient shiNIHness, and there may not be a POSIX-compatible shell ('bash --posix' is not, at least as of bash 4.3).
They may not, but there's so little original UNIX code in *BSD these days that it does not matter, in fact that's one of the main reasons they won the lawsuit in the first place.
I just opened my Red Book and reread «Short history of UNIX».
Berkley University bought license for AT&T UNIX[1] in 1977. They started to develop their own software for UNIX and distribute it, so this variant of UNIX is called BSD. Then they decide to remove and rewrite original AT&T code, due to license and associated costs, and released 4.3BSD[2], which then used by BSD flavors.
So BSD is UNIX, but it contains no AT&T code today.
Yes, my point is that since *BSD does not contain the original UNIX code anymore, it is no more UNIX than Linux is, since it was basically rewritten from scratch.
I understands your point but it's wrong because UNIX is system, not a single component. UNIX was generic name until it trademarked. See books, see complete code: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl . As you can see, BSD UNIX still contains lot of code from BSD UNIX.
"Unix kernel is hugely popular: think of the millions of Android devices."
You probably meant Linux, not Unix. Unix is an entire class of operating systems, not a kernel.
Nitpicking aside, the huge problem here is that popularity means nothing if the user is not aware of what he/she is using, so I would rephrase that as "the Linux kernel is hugely widespread ...".
There is still a big problem though: Android is mostly closed, at least all vital device drivers are, so that you have no chances to build a working non Android environment on newer devices or patch old ones, move an installation from a device to a different one etc. Having a Linux kernel does not help in this context since all benefits the FOSS community infused into the system were stripped away.
I would dare to say that telling people that Android contains a Linux kernel is even dangerous to the Linux image.
I don't like this argument, because Android is not developed openly and the kernel itself is a fork which lags behind the mainstream Linux development until Google implements the changes, which users see when they throw away their phone because Samsung/HTC/Xiaomi/Ulefone/Whatever doesn't want to update the phone or Verizon/ATT/Telenor/T-Mobile, etc., doesn't want to push the update because they branded the phone so that means its theirs but not their responsibility.
>Starting with Android 7, calling anything outside of that list will terminate the application.
Google could replace the kernel for something else, while keeping those NDK APIs and only OEMs writing drivers would notice
And they're planning on doing precisely that with Fuchsia
It's complicated. Original UNIX by AT&T was newer open-sourced. BSD (Berkley Software Distribution) was opensource distribution of user programs for UNIX (like TCP/IP stack, vi editor, etc.), used by original UNIX, with proportions 20% of AT&T code and 80% of BSD code. So technically, BSD is(0.8) not(0.2) UNIX. FreeBSD is branched from BSD code, so it is(0.8) not(0.2) UNIX too.
Apple MacOS X is based on FreeBSD code (and lot of other code), and it certified as UNIX compatible, so MacOS X can be named as UNIX. iOS is based on MacOS X, so iOS is UNIX too.
If you want to get technical about it, the Mac kernel itself isn't a traditional UNIX or BSD kernel; XNU (which, conveniently enough, stands for "X is not UNIX") is a hybrid composed of the Mach microkernel, some FreeBSD components, and Apple's own driver model.
The system as a whole is able to brand itself as UNIX compliant, though, because it complies with the Single UNIX Specification. That spec is concerned about userspace behavior, not kernel or implementation, and you don't have to include any actual UNIX source code to be able to brand your OS as a "UNIX" according to the spec and trademark guidelines.
Yep, XNU is Mach microkernel + FreeBSD kernel. Some features of XNU are even ported back to FreeBSD kernel. IMHO, that is enough to draw direct connection from XNU to original UNIX (without ™), unlike Linux kernel.
He asked about the Kernel. The Kernel is XNU / Mach, modified to act like a monolithic/hybrid kernel. The BSD code in Mac OS X is all user space, much of which probably isn't in iOS at all.
It's not. Apple's only certified for "macOS version 10.12 Sierra on Intel-based Mac computers" (previously that was "Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard on Intel-based Macintosh computers", etc)
I don't think iOS is anything else than OS X with a different facade (Cocoa Touch, which for UNIX doesn't matter) and a few additional services. It has all the usual POSIX interfaces (and some of the userland) underneath. So even if it violates some models (e.g. with regards to user accounts), it's still the same codebase, heralding from the BSD years.
TeX was and is available on a large number of OSes. I was very happy being to run a 'large' TeX instance on my Atari ST with 1 MB of ram, it could easily typeset my undergraduate thesis.
Indeed. TeX later moved to Pascal, but was originally written in SAIL for use on WAITS. GLS ported it to ITS (the first ever port of TeX), and also was responsible for lobbying Knuth to make it Turing-Complete.
Man, is there any part of modern computing that doesn't have GLS's fingerprints on it?
> Just as one hears of cars chosen for their cupholders, so were these users converted to Unix for trivial reasons: line numbers and vanity.
This is why Jobs was the visionary. "[L]ine numbers and vanity" are real-world problems with technical solutions. When you bridge technology into the real world, to create solutions in real lives, then you create value.
It's painful to consider that something like UNIX could be worthless, but it was worthless ... until it improved somebody's life. This is something I have not fully learned yet.
The real world is the ultimate judge. It's not an easy thing to do, but when you fully realize and accept this, you can then learn to harness it and in turn acquire infinite power to change things.
> Other documents began to accumulate in their directory. By the time we became aware of it, the hoard came to include minutes of AT&T board meetings. It didn't seem like a very good idea for us to be keeping records from the inner sanctum of the corporation on a computer where most everybody had super-user privileges.
I wonder how many meeting minutes, price lists, product specs, supplier agreements, etc. etc. are currently sitting on Google's, Amazon's, Dropbox's servers now...
Ok, that was important at AT&T, but not really why Unix currently rules the universe. Due to anti-trust settlements and cheap licensing, and copyright foibles, Unix was the cheap midrange choice for students and non-enterprise users. After a lot of pain, Unix eventually evolved into an "open standard". And that eventually evolved into an "open source" standard with Linux (and BSD, MacOS, etc.) To quote DEC's Ken Olsen[1]:
> [UNIX is] great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it’s great for interchanging programs between different machines. ... It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They’ll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
And that is why your cell phone runs Unix and not VMS.
[1] http://sinix.org/blog/?p=16