[HN Gopher] F/OSS Comics: 8. The Origins of Unix and the C Language
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F/OSS Comics: 8. The Origins of Unix and the C Language
Author : cubix4u
Score : 121 points
Date : 2024-04-17 06:51 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fosscomics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fosscomics.com)
| buggy6257 wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| This seems very likely, also considering that a/the main
| Multics dev was involved with Unix.
| p_l wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The pun is mentioned in the 1979 BLTJ Paper, _The Evolution
| of the Unix Time-sharing System_ 1.
|
| 1 https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.pdf
| holmak wrote:
| In "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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Making 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 wrote:
| The success of Dilbert is largely due to its accurately
| documenting the path that _Multics_ followed. ^_^
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| I 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_ wrote:
| > 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/
| vladak wrote:
| There is also https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
| (Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today)
| rahen wrote:
| > 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
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Is there a follow-up on Plan 9 OS?
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> Is there a follow-up on Plan 9 OS?
|
| Don't forget about Inferno too:
|
| 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/
| MisterTea wrote:
| Inferno 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/
| fao_ wrote:
| I'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.
| jjice wrote:
| Very 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Too bad Dave Cutler didn't write a memoir.
| luismedel wrote:
| I'm sure the NT kernel is a marvel but I'm afraid it's too
| late for me now :-)
| Sean-Der wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| judging 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 - David
| Plummer's interview:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Pet peeve: when someone calls something comics (a narrative told
| solely using sequential art) vs. illustrating a blog post.
| otteromkram wrote:
| Reading 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| It 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)
| mandarax8 wrote:
| Its in the comic before it.
| https://fosscomics.com/7.%20ITS%20and%20Hacker%20Culture/
| Simplicitas wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Corner Cafe in New Providence, New Jersey.
|
| From Rob Pike's blog:
| https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/utf-8-turned-20-y...
| ajstarks wrote:
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/ajstarks/albums/72157631470798.
| ..
| Simplicitas wrote:
| This is awesome. Thank you!
| dhosek wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| > ...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 wrote:
| Some 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 wrote:
| A thesaurus - sort of.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Isn't this what enciclopedias are? You have animals in one
| section, you have countries in another, you have every
| component in a motor vehicle in another, etc.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > I'm older than the command line.
|
| Many people are. ^_^
|
| > but why not arrange the words by, e.g., what sort of thing
| they're about?
|
| Organisation of words by letter is fast indexing for an ordered
| set of letters.
|
| That said, visual dictionaries exist, such as the Stoddart. [1]
|
| [1] _ https://search.worldcat.org/title/1039974083
| Mlller wrote:
| Regarding the alphabetical order, I think one of the oldest
| alphabetically organized dictonaries _extant_ is 'Alphabetical
| collection of all words' by Hesychios1. In his preface (written
| as a letter to a friend named Eulogios), Hesychios writes that
| quite a few other people in earlier times have made
| alphabetical collections of words, but always only for a
| certain subset, e.g. all homeric words, all words found in the
| tragedies or in the comedies etc. After them a certain
| Diogenianos was the first (according to Hesychios) to make an
| alphabetical collection of all words.2
|
| The names of the older lexicographers Hesychios mentions are:
| Appion (Appion - or Apion?)3, Apollonios son of Archibios
| (Apollonios o tou Arkhibiou)4, Theon (Theon)5, Didymos
| (Didumos)6.
|
| 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychius_of_Alexandria
|
| 2 https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/Epistula_ad_Eulogium - "kata
| stoikheion" is the phrase meaning 'by / according to the
| letter', understood as 'alphabetical(ly)'; "kath' ekaston
| stoikheion" 'by / according to every letter'.
|
| 3 a search turned up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apion
|
| 4 certainly
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonius_the_Sophist
|
| 5 I don't know, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelius_Theon
| perhaps?
|
| 6 a search turned up
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymus_Chalcenterus
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