Mid-life Crisis
Unix celebrates its 40th birthday
in a couple of months. Developers should really celebrate by having hundreds
of different flavours of birthday cake.
The software was penned by Ken
Thompson in August 1969. Thompson was a programmer at Bell Laboratories, who
knocked it out while his wife and kid were away for a bit. It took him a
week. Unix was first used on a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer which was fairly wimpy
considering where the beast was going to end up. In 1971 it was ported to
the PDP-11 minicomputer. Text-formatting and text-editing programs were
added, and it was rolled out to a few typists in the Bell Labs Patent
department.
Thompson rewrote Unix in C which made it a lot more portable
across computing environments and around then the name Unics was coined. Later they mis-spelled it as Unix. In 1974 the system was praised to the
skies by the Association for Computing Machinery and everyone wanted
it. The software could be run on smaller computers and had a pipe feature
which allowed the output of data from one program to another which was
important for the development of Unix variants such as Linux, DOS and
Windows. It was simple and easily modified and the source code was
free.
AT&T work up and realised that it had a money spinner on its hands
and from 1979, with the release of Version 7, Unix licenses prohibited universities from using the Unix source code for study in their
courses. So the computer experts came up with Minix which was based on an
earlier version of Unix. Minux would eventually morph into Linux.
Bill
Joy at Berkeley made a second major branch of Unix, called Berkeley Software
Distribution (BSD) Unix. In March 1978, Joy sent out copies of
1BSD, priced
at $50. And thus were born the Unix wars. Software developers started to
tinker with the Unix source code and while Unix was used, it was forked off
so many times it was possible to get a bit lost.
This enabled the entry
of Microsoft into the market which hand been Unix's turf. Windows NT took
out huge chunks of Unix business at a stroke. The Unix industry was panicked
into some standardisation but it came too late. Instead people which would
have gone to pure Unix played around with its love child, Linux.
It seems
that the reason why Unix is not as popular as it was is because of the same
reason it was popular in the first place. It is because with
all its
flavours it lost portability, which Linux and Windows do have. However the
system is not going away. Linux does not have Unix's long history of
development, stress testing or reliability. This makes it still the OS of
choice for many companies.