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F/OSS Comics: 8. The Origins of Unix and the C Language
- buggy6257 2y agoThey don't say in the comic, but it seems like maybe they named it Unix as a cheeky nod to the "Multics" being too complex so a "simpler Multics" would naturally be "Unics" Am I correct on this?
- zilti 2y agoThis seems very likely, also considering that a/the main Multics dev was involved with Unix.
- p_l 2y agoThe project actually started with the name UNICS, which was indeed a pun on MULTICS - after Bell Labs reduced/left involvement in Project MAC and some of the future Unix creators were part of that effort. UNICS started out on way way way less capable hardware to play with some concepts that were developed on Multics, so while there were some improvements, a lot of things are the way they are because of limitations enforced by 13 bit address space of PDP-7 and later 16bit moby style memory management on PDP-11 The move to PDP-11 was related to how some programs developed for Unix found interest among other teams at Bell Labs, and the budget for PDP-11 came from supporting secretaries working on patent documents with troff and related programs.
- sourcepluck 2y agoThe original Unix people were also - allegedly - aware of the pun on "Eunuchs", and joked about calling it an emasculated or "Eunuch" version of Multics. I'd love a bit of historical information on that, but it certainly is amusing.
- p_l 2y agoI have encountered mentions of discussions where Unics/Unix was purposefully read as "eunuch" as joke reference of "Multics without balls", but nothing that could be attributed/verified.
- sourcepluck 2y agoI chuckled at this. My fingers are firmly crossed now hoping Ken Thompson or some other legend from the good old days jumps in to englighten and maybe even regale us.
- kps 2y agoThe pun is mentioned in the 1979 BLTJ Paper, The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System¹. ¹ https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.pdf https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.pdf
- holmak 2y agoIn "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System" by Dennis Ritchie, he writes: > Although it was not until well into 1970 that Brian Kernighan suggested the name ‘Unix,’ in a somewhat treacherous pun on ‘Multics,’ the operating system we know today was born. I like this paper for its thorough description of the very earliest versions of the operating system.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago> in a somewhat treacherous pun on ‘Multics’ It is both fascinating and amusing to note that significant innovation came from talented peoples' frustration with software-development complexity, bureaucracy, and paralysis. Are we any better, half a century later?
- helboi4 2y agoMaking comics about software engineering stuff is a really good idea. I love this, its very charming. As someone who likes drawing and is an SE I'm sort of inspired.
- heresie-dabord 2y agoThe success of Dilbert is largely due to its accurately documenting the path that Multics followed. ^_^
- p_l 2y agoThe path that people think Multics followed. What is left out is that Project MAC was ridiculously ambitious. As in, most operating systems, and probably all multiuser/interactive ones, have Multics in the "tree of inventions" behind them. The issue is that Bell Labs wanted something smaller and more immediately usable and ultimately they got it by accident because few programmers had seen the future and started to miss it.
- alchemist1e9 2y agoI have this dream of a github repo that contains all the historical code along with instructions how to run emulators of the old hardware. I know there is a hardware accurate PDP-11 emulator, probably someone did a PDP-7 also - I haven’t looked. I’m not sure if all the original source code is publicly available, it ideally should be, hopefully nothing has been lost. Such a project would be like a digital historian. Preserving for future generations all technical details.
- fao_ 2y ago> I’m not sure if all the original source code is publicly available, it ideally should be, hopefully nothing has been lost. This all already exists! :D TUHS has an FTP with various dumps of the source code https://www.tuhs.org/ https://www.tuhs.org/
- vladak 2y agoThere is also https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo (Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today)
- rahen 2y ago> I know there is a hardware accurate PDP-11 emulator Better yet, simulator at the schematic or microcode level. The KA11 was the first PDP11 CPU accurately simulated but the KD11 also seems to be working. https://github.com/aap/pdp11 https://github.com/aap/pdp11
- fao_ 2y agoI'm incredibly disappointed that there's no reference to Joe F Ossana in this, given that he's the entire reason AT&T bankrolled UNIX in the first place.
- cubix4u 2y agoI've added a credit in the comic for Joe Ossanna's contributions to the Multics and Unix development. Thank you!
- lenerdenator 2y agoIs there a follow-up on Plan 9 OS?
- thesuperbigfrog 2y ago>> Is there a follow-up on Plan 9 OS? Don't forget about Inferno too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) A follow-on comic about Plan 9 and Inferno would be welcome, but this appears to be the latest one: https://fosscomics.com/all_posts/ https://fosscomics.com/all_posts/
- MisterTea 2y agoInferno was Lucents answer to Sun's Java and was intended as a commercial product. They stopped all Plan 9 development for a year to work on it. The big difference and attraction to me are the pure VM user space and the dual build path where you can build it for bare metal or hosted on a number of operating systems (Plan 9, Windows, BSD, Unix, Linux, web browser, etc.) That way you can run Inferno applications just about anywhere (even microcontrollers). The Limbo language is part of Go's lineage as well: https://seh.dev/go-legacy/ https://seh.dev/go-legacy/
- jjice 2y agoVery cool to see an illustrated version of my favorite software origin story :) For a more detailed explanation, Brian Kernighan's "UNIX: A History and Memoir" is fantastic, released just a few years ago.
- luismedel 2y agoI read that book the last summer (highly recommend it for a beach lecture) and, after years of back and forth between Unix and Windows, I finally ended using Unix as my dailiy driver. Call me whatever, but by reading the story, everything got aligned in my head. What I saw as complex and dumb decisions, suddenly made sense and I really appreciate how things work.
- layer8 2y agoToo bad Dave Cutler didn’t write a memoir.
- luismedel 2y agoI'm sure the NT kernel is a marvel but I'm afraid it's too late for me now :-)
- Sean-Der 2y agoThe book 'Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft' is a really great read on Dave Cutler. I would love more 'tech origin stories'. Next I am planning to read 'Soul of a new machine'. Another one I enjoyed was 'Open: How Compaq Ended IBM's PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing'
- webdevver 2y agojudging from how i've read other people describe him, Dave Cutler's personality seems antithecal to memoirs or biographies, from what I've read he seems to be very much like John Carmack in his total lack of sentimentality. Thankfully some enterprising people have managed to get him to sit infront of a camera, but its pretty light on the nitty gritty technical aspects: - Computer history museum interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY - David Plummer's interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE
- bugglebeetle 2y agoPet peeve: when someone calls something comics (a narrative told solely using sequential art) vs. illustrating a blog post.
- otteromkram 2y agoReading the comic and reading the exact same words as captions below it was a little annoying. I hope those were included for accessibility, but think they could be added as an ARIA attribute.
- samatman 2y agoThe figcaption could just be moved to the alt text. The redundancy serves no purpose to anyone, and the page would be better for it.
- cubix4u 2y agoThe text in the bubbles may be too small to read on mobile devices, which is why I've added the same text at the bottom of the image. I'm aware of the issue, so I can remove the text for desktop browsers.
- drewg123 2y agoIt would be nice if they included the part about why they had the PDP-7 in the first place, and what inspired them to start hacking on it: Because Ken Thompson wanted a cool machine to play "Space Travel" on. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)
- Simplicitas 2y agoI live in the New Jersey area where all of this happened. I wish someone could recall and mention the actual diner where UTF-8 was supposedly designed :-)
- dwcnnnghm 2y agoCorner Café in New Providence, New Jersey. From Rob Pike’s blog: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/utf-8-turned-20-years-old-in-2012.html?m=1 https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/utf-8-turned-20-y...
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- ajstarks 2y agohttps://www.flickr.com/photos/ajstarks/albums/72157631470798870/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/ajstarks/albums/72157631470798...
- Simplicitas 2y agoThis is awesome. Thank you!
- dhosek 2y agoThe thing that caught my attention (and nobody else has commented on) is that things we take for granted, most notably a command-line interface, is something that had to be invented.¹ A big part of my first job (at the UIC computing center in the mid-80s) was helping people figure out what was wrong with their JCL jobs they were sending to the MVS half of our IBM mainframe which had a command line (TSO) but which was an unpleasant thing to work with, especially compared to the CMS side of the mainframe which even had nice screen-based interactions. It’s a bit startling to realize that I’m older than the command line. ⸻ 1. Similarly, the idea of arranging the words in a dictionary by alphabetical order was something that only happened for the first time sometime around the 15th century (plus or minus a century maybe?) if I recall correctly. It seems obvious now, but why not arrange the words by, e.g., what sort of thing they’re about? After all, perhaps what you want from a dictionary is not to find out what a word means, but to find the right word to describe what you want to write about.
- stevefolta 2y ago> ...why not arrange the words by, e.g., what sort of thing they’re about? I don't know if that exists, but there are rhyming dictionaries.
- dhosek 2y agoSome early dictionaries did in fact do this, and this was also the case with Roget’s project with his thesaurus (most contemporary thesauri arrange the main headings in alphabetical order, thus the title, “Roget’s Thesaurus in Dictionary Form”) where he arranged the words in a tree of classifications. Most rhyming dictionaries are still alphabetical, but I think it was Webster’s that kept a file of headwords alphabetized in reverse order (so order would be sorted as redro, reverse as esrever, etc.) to facilitate the creation of rhyming dictionaries, but a case could be made that this order could be useful on its own.
- taylorius 2y agoA thesaurus - sort of.
- _f9cu 2y agoHey comics, Thanks for sharing. Here is something I made. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/introducing-web-designers-developer-vetrivel-shanmugam https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/introducing-web-designers-dev...
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- raspyberr 2y agoIs there an RSS feed of this at all? Tried a few pages and they don't add to my reader.