Posted on 07/20/2009 7:49:21 AM PDT by M203M4
Editorial
The Moon landing was not the only world-changing event in the summer of '69.
An international, cross-disciplinary survey by Nature on page 314 reveals just how powerfully the Apollo programme motivated young people to become scientists 40 years ago — a fact today's space scientists ignore at their peril (see pages 325 and 327).
Yet other events in the summer of 1969 would lead to a far deeper empowerment of scientists — and, indeed, many others. Even as Apollo 11 was putting the first humans on the Moon, Ken Thompson at AT&T's Bell Labs was working to get Space Travel, a computer game he'd written for a mainframe computer, to run on a new, smaller machine. That effort led him to join with Dennis Ritchie and others to write a new computer operating system, which they named Unix. The rest is history: Unix triggered a still-ongoing boom in scientific computing, set the pattern for the open-source software movement and, along with its descendants, laid the foundations for the Internet.
Thompson wrote the first version of Unix in four weeks. It was initially for internal use only. But when the code was licensed for use outside of Bell Labs in the 1970s, it was quickly adopted by scientists worldwide. They embraced Unix for its power, simplicity and its ability to let machines interact with multiple users at once. No longer did they have to run stacks of punch cards through huge mainframes and wait hours or days to get their results on reams of fan-fold paper. Now they could just type and the machine would respond.
Timing was also key to the success of Unix. It appeared just as the mainframes were being challenged by a new generation of smaller, cheaper, interactive 'minicomputers' suited to individual departments and research groups. The new operating system could easily be adapted to run on any of these machines. Perhaps most importantly, researchers loved the fact that Unix was written in C, a new programming language that made it easy for them to write and share applications — and even to refine the operating system itself. They lost no time in doing so, in a flurry of innovation that presaged the open-source movement.
In the 1980s and 1990s, that openness fell victim to shortsighted commercial interests, when infighting among vendors of proprietary Unix machines produced incompatible versions of the operating system. This allowed Unix to be blindsided by an upstart called Microsoft, which quickly acquired a dominant position in the burgeoning microcomputer market with its own operating systems.
Nonetheless, Unix's future had been guaranteed in the late 1970s by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which chose a version of the operating system developed at the University of California, Berkeley, as the basis for a number of its projects. And by funding Berkeley to include an implementation of the then-new TCP/IP protocols that underlay the Internet, the agency essentially made Unix Internet-ready. At the same time, the open-source movement became central to the Internet's development, with the Unix clone Linux, written in 1991 by Finnish student Linus Torvalds, coming to dominate.
Today, Linux or some other flavour of Unix runs most of the servers, routers and other elements of Internet infrastructure, as well as most mobile phones and GPS devices. And last week Google announced that it will use Linux as the base for its planned open-source 'Chrome' operating system.
The difference between the development of Unix and the top-down, colossal science and engineering project that was Apollo could hardly have been greater. Yet both are examples of the power of joint efforts. Unix, like Apollo, has earned its place in history.
It would seem that the "shortsighted commercial interests" of early vendors of proprietary Unix "allowed" Microsoft to deploy to market a software product that had widespread appeal amongst novice computer users. This "tragedy" then assisted in the widespread corporate and public adoption of personal computers. The resulting economies of scale brought by expanding markets for computer hardware were self-reinforcing, driving the price of computing low enough to permit not only the lowly huddled masses to buy computers, but also to permit the evil Bill Gates to distribute charity computers first across American schools, and then across the globe.
Today, horror of horrors, entire computer systems (which can even surf Al Gore's internet!) are available for under $200 (at Wal*Mart no less!).
All of this could have been avoided if the government enforced standardization, and if enough government support for esoteric Unix distros was furnished to price out all newbie-friendly, exoteric operating systems like evil, evil Windows and Apple.
All of this is typed from a free Linux distro...I love Linux, but to pretend the computing boom could have occurred with CLI based operating systems (yes, I know of the boutique early exceptions) is laughable. Apple and Microsoft did for computers what Starbucks did for coffee in America - create widespread consumer demand for what was earlier only a niche market.
Two things: Torvalds wrote the kernel, while the bulk of the operating system was put together by Stallman's group, so giving credit only to Torvalds is either a sign of ignorance or prejudice; and it's GNU/Linux, not Linux, grrrr!
My initial reaction EXACTLY.
Grandmother test fails on Ubuntu to this day. Grandma’s can view pictures from emails on Windows, no prob.
Even good desktop distros of linux are a little non-intuitive.
OS X Leopard is based off Unix.
Actually it’s a full fledged Unix system (with Leopard anyway, wasn’t until then), only with some modification made with the Kernel and system that are proprietary, unlike Linux.
Nice analysis M2.
In 1969 Bill Gates was in high school writting code routines to help the State of Washington analyze traffic patterns with those air tubes across the road.
Ancient Chinese Proverb:
“A foolish idea, held by thousands, is still a foolish idea.”
Sorry, but I _really_ don’t like Unix (or its derivatives) as I believe the underlying design principles to be poorly chosen.
What do you prefer?
Leopard is Unix©All OS X is based on BSD Unix.
In 1969, Bill Gates was 14 years old, and had only been exposed to computers for a year.
I think you've fallen for an urban myth.
Also, the X-11 Windows sever is vastly superior, the X concept of exporting a display is foreign to MS Windows(still haven't got to that!). If you don't know what I am talking about then you don't know what you're missing. Window seems so primative compared to X-11
Windows is built upon similar underlying design principles. It's just a different and inferior implementation — different for both historical and proprietary reasons. For instance, do you think the text escape symbol should have been chosen as the file path separator?
Had there not been a Bell Labs to break up I was an MTS in Bell Labs and you are only partially correct.
the critical seminal work would never have been done.
What *nix flavors have you tried? I tired of rebuilding my three son’s laptops because of downloaded viruses and installed OpenSuse 11.0. They quickly adapted and are now virus free! Open Office on Suse is just as capable as M$Office and it’s free.
One other things people seem to forget, is that many of the Unix distributors refused to make a user friendly version for the home market, Scott McNealy was completely against porting Sun Unix over to the home market.
Back in the mid 90’s Sun could of made an OS to compete with Windows, but refused, so here we are.
I had to laugh when the labs started designing modems for Ma Bell to sell and the engineers insited they did not have to have the Hayes command set.
The author make no mention of the MULTICS roots of Unix©Bell Labs dropped out of the MULTICS consortium in 1969.
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