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BBC article - 40 years of Unix + RFC 681

The BBC article "40 years of Unix" have some interesting stuff in it:

• "With Multics they tried to have a much more versatile and flexible operating system, and it failed miserably," said Dr Peter Salus, author of the definitive history of Unix's early years. (I don't find the failure in the wikipedia article)

Multics didn't exactly fail, and indeed it later became a Honeywell product. However, it is fair to say that many of the people working on it felt that it wasn't living up to its hype. Also, because it required a large, expensive computer, it wasn't feasible to treat it as a personal toy which could be rebooted at will. — DAGwyn (talk) 12:52, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

• Multics cancellation gave the two researchers assigned to the project, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, a lot of time. And frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not the aims. Decided to try and finish the work on a much smaller scale.
• "Something that was much more compact than the operating systems that were current at that time which ran on the dinosaurs"
• Won its success by:
  • Direct interaction.
  • Move away from the total control of businesses like IBM and DEC.
  • AT&T's willingness to give the software away for free.
  • Ran on cheap hardware.
  • Was easy to adopt and move to different machines.
  • Chosen operating system for the internet (RFC 681).
• "The really nice part is the flexibility and adaptability," said Dr Salus, explaining why it is so widespread.
• "Unix is the best screwdriver ever built," said Dr Salus.

____ RFC 681 from 1975-May-14 ____

The RFC 681 details some very specific reasons as to why Unix where chosen as the operating system of choice for ARPANET. And how the evaluation was made as well. Even details like the 150 USD educational license, and a 20 000 USD non-university license. Though Bell was open to suggestions for an Arpa network wide license.

In any way RFC 681 may be important to understand why things went as they did.

• Local processing facilities.
• Compilers.
• Editor.
• Document preparation system.
• Efficient file system and access control.
• Mountable and de-mountable volumes.
• Unified treatment of peripherals as special files.
• The network control program (ncp), is integrated within the Unix file system.
• Network connections are treated as special files which can be accessed through standard Unix i/o calls.
• The system closes all files on program exit.
• "is desirable to minimize the amount of code added to the basic unix kernel".

• Development hardware used:

"The network software for unix was developed on a PDP-11/50, with memory management, two RK05 disk packs, two nine track magtape drives, four dectape drives, 32k words of core, and three terminals. presently this has been expanded to encompass a DH11 terminal multiplexor, an RP03 moving head disk, a twin platter rf11 fixed head disk, floating point, and 48k of core. User files are stored on the RP03. the RF11 is used as a swap disk and for temporary file storage; one RK05 platter contains the system files, and the second contains login and accounting information. In the near future, the system will be expanded to 128k words of core memory with 10 dial in and 10 hard wired terminal lines.

7A

The base operating system occupies 24.5k words of memory. this system includes a large number of device drivers, and enjoys a generous amount of space for i/o buffers and system tables. A minimal system would require 40k words of hardware memory. It should be noted that Unix also requires the memory management"

As a comparison the "network control program" (NCP) in kernel code uses 3.5k and the userspace swappable is approx 8.5k.

• "After telnet has proved itself reliable, the open system call will be expanded to include further parameterization .. ability to listen on a local socket"

• "After those extensions, net mail, then network ftp and finally network RJE will be implemented. all will run as user programs so the kernel system size will not increase."

• "Gary Grossman who participated in the design and wrote the ncp daemon"

• "Steve Bunch who was the third member of our design group and wrote the kernel message software."

Maybe someone can incorporate all this into the main article?

Electron9 (talk) 01:28, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Above added per today Electron9 (talk) 10:05, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

UN-BELIEVABLE. { http://www.psexam.com/Notes-for-Computer-Science/operating-systems-history-of-operating-system-article/All-Pages.html } and also Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions (1976) contains the complete source code of the 6th Edition Unix kernel. Your comments re NCP circa 1969 (http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_ncp.htm) and RFC681 circa 1981 seems to be a non sequiter.

• ("Something that was much more compact than the operating systems that were current at that time which ran on the dinosaurs") 160KB floppy drives were a novelty in 1976 and most Mainframes were loaded by paper tape. Lions' Commentary has way more than 24KB of Object code. "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" by Andrew S. Tanenbaum notes that although AT&T allowed teaching CompSci using source, that it was restricting commercial use. The minimal Minix unix OS was over 10,000 lines of source.
• Won its success by:
  • ("Direct interaction.") in that era Terminals.
  • ("Move away from the total control of businesses like IBM and DEC.") AT&T anyone?
  • ("AT&T's willingness to give the software away for free.") Not exactly true. See above, AT&T prevented distribution of Lions' Commentary containing AT&T source code.
  • ("Ran on cheap hardware.") PDP-11/23 was $40K. Tandy model II in 1980 was $2500.
  • ("Was easy to adopt and move to different machines.")
  • ("Chosen operating system for the internet (RFC 681).") based on it containing the non-routable protocol, NCP. Many early UNIX systems of that era used IPX. Shjacks45 (talk) 10:19, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Actually 24KB is about right for the "non-BSS" RAM requirements for 6th Ed. Unix (which is what Lions described), assuming a minimal set of device drivers were installed. The PDP-11 was "cheap" compared to alternatives like the DECsystem-10; the (not yet available) Tandy II would not have been a viable candidate for an ARPAnet host. I was around for the NCP->TCP "flag day;" we did it using PDP-11 Unix systems. — DAGwyn (talk) 07:44, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

microkernel

"The microkernel tried to reverse the growing size of kernels and return to a system in which most tasks would be completed by smaller utilities." Does this line go with the rest of the paragraph? It reads like the microkernel was the method for using mice and it didn't work maybe? --Gbleem 01:36, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

The whole "Overview" needs revamping. I think it was trying to say that Unix has a microkernel architecture, but that's not right, at least not according to current usage of that term. I think the bit about mouse handling was trying to say that polling was awkward (note that many of us added some form of support for polling, now standard in the form of select()). That whole paragraph should be revisited taking into account experience with Plan 9 from Bell Labs. — DAGwyn 07:51, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

This entire section is still messed up. I could try and fix it, but someone with more knowledge about kernels would probably be better. 67.238.156.133 (talk) 04:51, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Missing "Criticism" section ?!?

Before I start, I am NOT trying to start a flame war or to troll around this article – honestly! Knowing the hard-core UNIX crowd, I better start with this disclaimer ;-)

I am wondering if a "criticism" section is missing in this article. M$ gets (rightly and justifiably) slapped for its operating systems with industrial strength criticism.

However, to they average user, UNIX tends to be nightmare. Examples are:

• Cryptic command line commands, arbitrarily used sub-commands and unstructured syntax (for example /S means always something with subdirectory in MS DOS. In UNIX shells, -s can mean about anything and –S something completely different).
• File level locking only “out of the box” in many UNIX varieties,
• Little to no security “out of the box”,
• Etc.

GUIs are often not structured enough to make the command line shells obsolete.

A few people I knew who used the various UNIX flavours on their PCs kept mentioning that they had to “recompile their OS” fairly frequently.

Therefore, in order to be NPOV with other OS, a criticism section might be a good idea.

HagenUK (talk) 14:57, 17 June 2008 (UTC) (Getting ready for the beating I am going to get ;-)

Criticism sections are discouraged on Wikipedia, they attract bad contributions, unencyclopedic info, POV pushing, and original research. Actually, your list is a perfect example of such things. Oh, right, I'm sure the next will be on the lines of "but, but, but [...] article has a criticism section" let me be preemptive and say that's irrelevant, a bad practice in other article(s) can't be used to justify making the same mistake in another article. Besides, an OS is not an opera, a book or movie to need a "critical acclaim" section. If there are downsizes to the OS they can be mentioned inside the article organically, not in a separate original research-attracting section. -- AdrianTM (talk) 15:19, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

"… but, but, but [ Os2#Problems, DR_DOS#Controversies, Windows_2000#Security_criticisms, Windows_XP#Common_criticisms, Windows_Vista#Criticism ] article has a criticism section".

And there is a whole atricle on Criticism_of_Microsoft --Jake3373 01:44, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Pretending that UNIX (which is, in my POV, as much a 1970th relict as MVS, VM and VMS are) has no flaws is also not very encyclopedic either, isn’t it?

My list above contains fairly common criticism which can be easily backed up from any major IT publication on the web.

Anyway, I leave at that (not interested to engage in edit wars with UNIX fundamentalists).

HagenUK (talk) 08:00, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Now seriously, do you think that "-s can mean about anything and –S something completely different" is an encyclopedic item? And please restrain calling people names, "UNIX fundamentalist" for example, if they don't agree with your point of view. BTW, I have the same opinion about all the other articles, it just happen that I watched this page, and is easier to block crapifying a page with a "Criticism" section than to remove one from an article, if I go removing criticism from Windows I will be accused that I'm a Windows fundamentalist... just like you insinuated here that I'm a UNIX fundamentalist. -- man with one red shoe (talk) 13:39, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Certainly Unix has genuine flaws; indeed, Plan 9 from Bell Labs attempts to take the best ideas from Unix and expand them, replacing the rest of traditional Unix with facilities based on new ideas. However, much of what HagenUK criticizes about Unix amounts to "it's different from an OS I was already familiar with before I met Unix," which is an entirely different kind of criticism (and one that doesn't belong in an encyclopedia). The usual Wikipedia practice is to mention significant (well supported) criticisms at appropriate places within the main article. Sometimes, due to sheer amount of criticism, a separate criticism article has been set up (I did that twice myself), but it's usually frowned upon. — DAGwyn (talk) 21:57, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

The pith is, HagenUK's comments seem like original research to me. Gwen Gale (talk) 22:42, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

An appropriate set of criticisms would be from Eric S. Raymond's Art of Unix Programming[1]. Raymond's list does not include the oft-repeated "cryptic command line" criticism.Trashbird1240 (talk) 00:47, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Not only do these criticisms appear to be original research, but some are just opinions with nothing to back them up, and some are just untrue. Unix may have had little to no security out of the box in 1998 before the Morris worm, but most vendor systems are fairly secure these days, and a newly installed linux system with SE Linux installed is very tight. --ssd (talk) 12:16, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

It needs a criticism section more than the microsoft page did. The closed nature of unix was what inspired Linux and the open source movement. It is a very significant part of the story 24.207.129.95 (talk) 18:59, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

What about this information from "The Unix-Haters handbook"?

B Creators Admit C, Unix Were Hoax FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for more than 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following: “In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth’s ETH labs in Switzerland, and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users’ frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. “Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called “A.” When we found others were actually trying to create real 308 Creators Admit C, Unix Were Hoax programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax: for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=P("_"+(*u++/ 8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2); “To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other U.S. corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960s technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. “In any event, Brian, Dennis, and I have been working exclusively in Lisp on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion, and truly bad programming that has resulted from our silly prank so long ago.” Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS/6000, merely stating “Workplace OS will be available Real Soon Now.” In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH Institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2, and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.

Page 338 of "The Unix-Haters Handbook" file http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX-HATERS_Handbook — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.125.191.144 (talk) 22:32, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I give up. What about it? - Richfife (talk) 18:01, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

The fact that none of this information is in the article?86.125.191.144 (talk) 22:06, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

I mean, if the founder himself (Dennis Ritchie) denounces the whole thing as a hoax, shouldn't this at least be mentioned in the article?86.125.191.144 (talk) 22:08, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

The UHH was a gathering of messages sent through an early kind of listserv and was meant to be funny. That old "Thompson-Ritchie" quote showed up on April 1st, 1991[2], at the height of the Unix wars, as an April fools joke, April 1st pranks being long beloved by early users on the Internet (and yes, it's funny). By the bye, today, Apple's Mac OS X is a wholly certified UNIX OS, with its deep roots in NextStep and FreeBSD, both of which were drawn from BSD UNIX. Gwen Gale (talk) 23:26, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

See also [3]. Gwen Gale (talk) 23:54, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

So what, this information is still missing from the article. Someone could easily create a small paragraph that tells of the very begginings of Unix and calls it what it was: a hoax. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.125.191.144 (talk) 11:11, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

It was a joke. The end. --Macrakis (talk) 16:08, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

The whole thing was a waste of bandwidth from the outset and as a matter of policy such things should not be perpetuated by the Wikipedia. — DAGwyn (talk) 06:29, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Oh really, since when is uncovering truth a waste of bandwidth??? Ignorants. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.29.173.20 (talk) 18:59, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, since the people to whom you replied quoted facts, a wise person would argue they are not, in fact, ignorant. The same might not be said, on the other hand, of someone that cannot even sign a Talk page comment. — UncleBubba ^{( T @ C )} 02:45, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't want to sign because of privacy concerns Bubba. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.235.45.104 (talk) 18:21, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

UNiplexed Information Computing System?

An IP user added the unsourced claim that "UNIX is actually an abbreviated form of UNiplexed Information Computing System (UNICS), now spelled as UNIX", which I reverted. A web search shows a large number of unreliable sources that repeat the claim, but no obvious reliable source. If the claim can be sourced, it should be in the article. If it cannot be sourced, should we mention it as being a common misconception? Guy Macon (talk) 09:22, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

The source is the guy who coined the term UNIX, and its not an abbreviated form, ( that is not what he said ). Its name was a play on MULTICS, and was derived from the terms "UNiplexed Information Computing System" again as a play on MULTICS.

"During 1969 an alternative was being worked on, and in 1970 this alternative was given the name of UNIX, a pun on the name Multics since UNIX can support multiple users and multiple processes. The name was coined by Brian Kernighan."

[4]

"We even knew that it had a joke name, Unix, coined by Brian Kernighan, that was a reference to Multics. ("One of whatever Multics was many of" or "Multics without balls.")"

[5]

So, I have two sources, he has none. I win. Pbbbbbt

Those are not reliable sources. Peter Salus credits Neumann with the name, and from the start, the system support multiple users. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 19:08, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Ok, I double-checked and Salus states that it stood for "UNIplexed Information and Computing Service". Still, I removed all mention of UNICS because History of Unix is a better place to discuss this kind of trivia. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 19:11, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Android belongs in the unix-lke family?

As far as I know it is not and should be removed from the last paragraph of the first sections where it is listed alongside minix linux etc... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.74.111.134 (talk) 13:39, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I think it may be cited as an important offspring through the Linux line. Honestly it bears as much resemblance as iOS on an iPhone. Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson wouldn't recognise either, but still some of their work live in these products. 216.221.57.108 (talk) 03:35, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Android may use a Linux kernel, but the system lacks the basic features of a Unix-like system. Having a Unix-like kernel is just one small part of a Unix-like system. In other ways, Android is not Unix-like, so it should not be described as such. GNU/Linux is Unix-like, but Android is not GNU/Linux -- it just happens to use a Linux kernel. It does not have the GNU coreutils and other base system software that is needed to have a Unix-like system. Huihermit (talk) 04:29, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Security holes claim

Am I the only one who doubts the second sentence (marked bold)?

Unix provided the TCP/IP networking protocol on relatively inexpensive computers, which contributed to the Internet explosion of worldwide real-time connectivity, and which formed the basis for implementations on many other platforms. This also exposed numerous security holes in the networking implementations.

It formed the basis for implementations and therefore exposed holes in them? Any references telling more about it? --Sergei (talk) 21:15, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

This sentence is so unclear that I just removed it. If someone wants this back, they'll need a good source for it. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 22:45, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 11 April 2014

The release year for UNIX should be 1969, not 1973 (see the official website: http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html). It was shown as 1969 in the original wiki page. Tonga2010 (talk) 14:38, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

 Not done The earliest "release date" given in the article you are citing is 1982.
The only reference to 1969 is that is when they "started working on the "little-used PDP-7 in a corner" at Bell Labs and what was to become UNIX"
"Started working on" is clearly not a release date. Arjayay (talk) 14:57, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 4 April 2014

Flavours of Unix:

Unix is not a single operating system. It has many flavors i.e implementations .Different flavors have their own unique commands and features, and designed to work with different types of hardware.

Here are some lists:

   Solaris by Sun Microsystems
   AIX by IBM
   BSD/OS (BSDi) by Wind River
   Tru64 Unix (formerly Digital Unix) by Compaq Computer Corp.
   FreeBSD by FreeBSD Group
   GNU Herd by GNU Organization
   HAL SPARC64/OS by HAL Computer Systems, Inc.
   HP-UX by Hewlett-Packard Company
   Irix by Silicon Graphics, Inc.
   Linux by several groups LynxOS by Lynx Real-Time Systems, Inc.
   MacOS X Server by Apple Computer, Inc.
   NetBSD by NetBSD Group
   OpenBSD by OpenBSD Group
   OpenLinux by Caldera Systems, Inc.
   Openstep by Apple Computer, Inc.
   Red Hat Linux by Red Hat Software, Inc.
   SCO Unix by The Santa Cruz Operation Inc.
   SuSE by S.u.S.E., Inc.
   UNICOS by Silicon Graphics, Inc.

Itechonic (talk) 11:57, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

---

Not done: it's not clear what changes you want made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(t • e • c)} 13:34, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

What the f*ck is a "flavor"? You should be forbidden to contribute anything here! What you probably mean, is the UNIX kernel-to-userspace API. Sadly, there had been no one such API, there were a couple of them until POSIX. POSIX tried to create s single such kernel-to-userspace API from all of those APIs. As a result, POSIX, is not a clean design, but describes an API composed of a "loosely similar set" of APIs.

But that is the past.

Today, UNIX® refers to a registered trademark, nothing more. There is not such thing, as a "Unix operating system". Instead, we have a couple of operating systems, that comply with the Single UNIX Specification, that means their kernel-to-userspace API does, and that is it. Software written for this API, is source-code portable to all such UNIX®-certified operating systems.

Oh, Single UNIX Specification contains exactly the same specification as POSIX does!

Sadly, some zealots active in the Wikipedia, rather talk about the glorious past™, and long discontinued operating systems, which for some reasons, they call Unix. This deplorable custom should be abandoned, and a short article simply say, that UNIX® is a registered trademark, that you can advertise your operating system with, if its kernel-to-userspace API is tests complaint with it.

Other zealots created the Unix-like article, to described in a very word-rich, convoluted and labyrinthine way, operating systems that are NOT UNIX®-compliant, but, uhm, almost, or whatever.

Now YOU (Itechonic) came along with "flavor". What is a "flavor"? User:ScotXW^t@lk 08:17, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

I hope you do not try to edit articles using your knowledge on POSIX. Just because Linux does not follow POSIX does not mean that other do the same. So let me correct: POSIX creates a cleaned up interface based on existing interfaces. POSIX of course is recent and actively developed and you can get a UNIX branding if you pass the POSIX conformance suite. Schily (talk) 15:18, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Not good enough

Wanted to link to a basic description of and introduction to Unix, but I just can't bring myself to use this article. The very first paragraph has several issues that make me wonder just what the hell you guys are trying to do here. Mickey-pedia (so-called because it's so mickey mouse) has a really bad case of "too many cooks spoil the broth", coupled with a devastating lack of the KISS principle. 72.16.17.161 (talk) 17:38, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Talk pages are places for people to discuss *specific* improvements and not just rant (for or against) the current content. Given that, do you have any specific suggestions for improving the article (with appropriate reliable sources to cite)? Otherwise your comments might work better on your blog. Thanks. SQGibbon (talk) 18:17, 24 August 2014 (UTC)