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> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I agree. At the same time, unless you immerse yourself in oral tradition and try to a

> I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry. I agree. At the same time, unless you immerse yourself in oral tradition and try to assemble a picture of the diversity of what was going on from it, it's hard to get a sense of what has happened on a scale larger than a particular community, and sometimes not even then. I occasionally think about trying to write a one volume history of computing. > UNIX is foundational to essentially all software-driven technology today, in one way or another. Except Windows, which comes from VMS, which predates Unix. And SQL, which comes from IBM mainframe land. I could probably come up with a few more, but it's late and I'm tired.

WalterGR 7y ago
Lisp comes to mind.
tannhaeuser 7y ago
Also from IBM: Hypervisors/VMs, ancestors of today's containers and SGML, foundation of HTML and XML
cestith 7y ago
Largely agreed, but VMS by no means predates Unix. Unix was in development in 1969, had a manual released inside AT&T in 1971 and was announced publicly in 1973. The first source license was sold in 1975. VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RSX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix (which was developed on the PDP series, first the PDP-7).
- acqq 7y ago
  > Unix (...) first source license was sold in 1975. > VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RTX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix Before VMS there was RSX-11 (note RSX not RTX): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX-11 "From 1971[5] to 1976 the RSX-11M project was spearheaded by noted operating system designer Dave Cutler, then at his first project.[5] Principles first tried in RSX-11M appear also in later designs led by Cutler, DEC's VMS and Microsoft's Windows NT.[6][7][8]" In Dave's words: https://tech-insider.org/windows/research/1992/11.html https://tech-insider.org/windows/research/1992/11.html "RSX-11M was introduced in 1973, 18 months after we started building" Note Dave Cutler and note the years. I'd say the history is comparable.
  - cestith 7y ago
    Thanks for pointing out the typo. I'll fix that. Note "heavily influenced" doesn't make RSX-11 any more VMS than it makes Multics into Unix, or CP/M into MS-DOS, or the NeXT into a Mac, or an Alto into a Mac or Windows. Also note that 1973 doesn't significantly predate 1973. Don't confuse the first source license same with the announcement of availability, which I also noted. And Unix was in use internally at AT&T the same year DEC started on RSX-11.
    - acqq 7y ago
      Dave Cutler was the developer of of RSX-11, VMS and the NT. I don't claim that his entire life work predates the work of somebody else, just that the products he delivered are definitely comparable in its commercial availability with Unix. I would also be not surprised if his products had more users at these first years than Unix did. To do the history right one should not project the results visible today (or which happened much later) to the history.
      - cestith 7y ago
        The claim I was correcting was that VMS itself predated Unix itself. This claim is false on its face. Yes, multiple people in the history of the field have worked on more than line project.
onei 7y ago
I guess you could make the case that windows is written in C++, which is a superset of C which was designed while writing UNIX. Sure the OS is different, but it ended up being built from the same blocks. If we didn't have C, would we have Windows as it is today?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Looking back at what Xerox PARC and ETHZ were doing with their workstations, maybe that wouldn't have been much of an issue.
  - acqq 7y ago
    Yes the high level language on first Macintoshes was Pascal. Lowest level was assembly. Pascal was not bad at that role, and it would have been possible to develop all the code which was eventually written in C in Pascal too. At least in the dialects that weren’t made just for education.
    - kabdib 7y ago
      Apple's version of Pascal had a lot of non-standard extensions. If you squinted, it was essentially C.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        So any system programming language with extensions for hardware access were essentially C? Even those 10 years older than C?
        kragen 7y ago
        Pascal used var parameters rather than pointers into the stack and supported nested subroutines with lexical scope, limiting them to being passed as downward funargs to ensure safety, and it barely missed requiring tag checks on variant record access (an omission Wirth bitterly lamented). Pascal had pointers, but they were strictly for heap-allocated objects, not var parameters or array iteration. In standard Pascal, array size was part of the array type, so you couldn't write functions that operated on arrays of unknown size, because bounds checking of array accesses would have otherwise required passing an additional length word. That's why the string type in TeX is an index into a humongous string pool array. I think this illustrates how the philosophy of Pascal differed from that of C.

WalterGR 7y ago

Lisp comes to mind.

tannhaeuser 7y ago

Also from IBM: Hypervisors/VMs, ancestors of today's containers and SGML, foundation of HTML and XML

cestith 7y ago

Largely agreed, but VMS by no means predates Unix. Unix was in development in 1969, had a manual released inside AT&T in 1971 and was announced publicly in 1973. The first source license was sold in 1975. VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RSX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix (which was developed on the PDP series, first the PDP-7).

acqq 7y ago
> Unix (...) first source license was sold in 1975. > VMS was released in 1977 as VAX/VMS on the VAX series of computers. Before VMS the DEC hardware ran various other operating systems such as RTX-11, TOPS-10, and optionally AT&T Unix Before VMS there was RSX-11 (note RSX not RTX): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX-11 "From 1971[5] to 1976 the RSX-11M project was spearheaded by noted operating system designer Dave Cutler, then at his first project.[5] Principles first tried in RSX-11M appear also in later designs led by Cutler, DEC's VMS and Microsoft's Windows NT.[6][7][8]" In Dave's words: https://tech-insider.org/windows/research/1992/11.html https://tech-insider.org/windows/research/1992/11.html "RSX-11M was introduced in 1973, 18 months after we started building" Note Dave Cutler and note the years. I'd say the history is comparable.
- cestith 7y ago
  Thanks for pointing out the typo. I'll fix that. Note "heavily influenced" doesn't make RSX-11 any more VMS than it makes Multics into Unix, or CP/M into MS-DOS, or the NeXT into a Mac, or an Alto into a Mac or Windows. Also note that 1973 doesn't significantly predate 1973. Don't confuse the first source license same with the announcement of availability, which I also noted. And Unix was in use internally at AT&T the same year DEC started on RSX-11.
  - acqq 7y ago
    Dave Cutler was the developer of of RSX-11, VMS and the NT. I don't claim that his entire life work predates the work of somebody else, just that the products he delivered are definitely comparable in its commercial availability with Unix. I would also be not surprised if his products had more users at these first years than Unix did. To do the history right one should not project the results visible today (or which happened much later) to the history.
    - cestith 7y ago
      The claim I was correcting was that VMS itself predated Unix itself. This claim is false on its face. Yes, multiple people in the history of the field have worked on more than line project.

onei 7y ago

I guess you could make the case that windows is written in C++, which is a superset of C which was designed while writing UNIX. Sure the OS is different, but it ended up being built from the same blocks. If we didn't have C, would we have Windows as it is today?

pjmlp 7y ago
Looking back at what Xerox PARC and ETHZ were doing with their workstations, maybe that wouldn't have been much of an issue.
- acqq 7y ago
  Yes the high level language on first Macintoshes was Pascal. Lowest level was assembly. Pascal was not bad at that role, and it would have been possible to develop all the code which was eventually written in C in Pascal too. At least in the dialects that weren’t made just for education.
  - kabdib 7y ago
    Apple's version of Pascal had a lot of non-standard extensions. If you squinted, it was essentially C.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      So any system programming language with extensions for hardware access were essentially C? Even those 10 years older than C?
      - kragen 7y ago
        Pascal used var parameters rather than pointers into the stack and supported nested subroutines with lexical scope, limiting them to being passed as downward funargs to ensure safety, and it barely missed requiring tag checks on variant record access (an omission Wirth bitterly lamented). Pascal had pointers, but they were strictly for heap-allocated objects, not var parameters or array iteration. In standard Pascal, array size was part of the array type, so you couldn't write functions that operated on arrays of unknown size, because bounds checking of array accesses would have otherwise required passing an additional length word. That's why the string type in TeX is an index into a humongous string pool array. I think this illustrates how the philosophy of Pascal differed from that of C.