40 Years of Unix

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-...f-Unix-772359/

This is something I just found after checking my email, and I'm posting it here for anyone who's interested. I haven't read through it yet as I'm on the first page but, given that Unix currently has been with us for 40 years, I think we can all say wow about that. At least a little.

I don't know of really any other software that has been around in some form for this long.

It does have an interesting part to it though; What if the versions of Unix WERE smaller? would we still only be using one? Even back in the early days, Unix went to Berkeley and we got BSD, Vi, and TCP/IP. The internet was made on Unix, for Unix. The others had to catch up. The whole world as we know may have been very different had it not been for something that stared 40 years ago.

DOS has been around for a fairly long time now, but Microsoft stopped having DOS built right in with Windows NT / 2000 / XP, and for a good reason of course (Having firect hardware access like that is easy to use but VERY unstable) and what about Macs? Well, Mac OS has been around a long time too, but the current version is based on BSD Unix.

Anyway, I'm going to finish reading this and see if anything of interest is brought up.

Um... Cobal, CAD, and SQL

Probably should have specified:

OSs... I know, I said software. It was a screw up. (I'd say typo but that's past that).

System 360 was released in 1965.

Where is system360 used today? No Air traffic control doesn't count.

P.S.I can't believe they misspelled Linus.

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Originally Posted by Cheap Scotch Ron

System 360 was released in 1965.

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That used punch cards though didn't it?

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Originally Posted by KorpDeath

Where is system360 used today? No Air traffic control doesn't count.

P.S.I can't believe they misspelled Linus.

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Holy...Where have YOU been? I almost considered driving to sissy land to make sure you were OK.

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Originally Posted by KorpDeath

Where is system360 used today?

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ATMs

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Originally Posted by Negative

ATMs

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ATMs here run either Windows or Linux. Depending of course where the thing is. (I've seen an ATM Blue Screen once.)

VMS, OpenVMS

gore old chap,how could you?:eek:

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That used punch cards though didn't it?

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This is from a paper published November 1967:

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Abstract : An interface which connects a small special-purpose digital computer to a large general-purpose digital data processing system is described in this report. The small computer is the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 which itself is a component of a data collection and distribution system called the Data Concentrator. The large data processing system is the IBM System/360 Model 67, which is the principal computing element at The University of Michigan Computing Center.:lildevil: The interface is designed to be attached to the multiplexor channel of the Model 67 along with other input-output components such as card readers, line printers, and communications equipment, and satisfies all IBM standards and interface conventions established for this type of attachment. The interface provides a bidirectional data transfer between the two machines of up to 80 thousand bytes (characters) per second using cycle-steal techniques in which data are transferred directly between the Model 67 multiplexor channel and the PDP-8 core memory without explicit program intervention.

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So, your State University was using a DEC PDP-8 as a direct data entry link to an IBM S/360 (for which OS/360 was written) back in 1967.:cool:

I used an IBM S360 Model 60 from 1969 to 1972, and yes, my data entry was via 80 column punched cards. However (IIRC) data entry could also be via punched paper tape, disk drives, magnetic tapes, and directly through a teleprinter-like device. I would guess that 8" floppy disks were supported as these were an IBM invention?

I believe that the possibilities and limitations were down to the peripherals technology of the day, and not a function of the operating system.

I came across this in the IBM history files:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ex...me_PP2044.html

The S/360/M44 is in the left foreground and the nearest guy is leaning over the operator's console, it is one of those teleprinter thingies I mentioned :D

In the centre background you can see 4 magnetic tape drives.

In the centre between the two guys is a magnetic disk drive. Front right is a card reader and behind it is a dot matrix line printer.

The second guy is sitting at a console looking at what appears to be a VDU. I don't recognise the exact bit of kit, but it looks like a punched card machine.

I am not sure what the thing against the back wall is...........possibly a plotter?

Incidentally, back then you could have any colour you liked as long as it was mushroom, so someone has been busy with the vinyl covering. :)

EDIT:

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Where is system360 used today? No Air traffic control doesn't count.

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It isn't................ATC still uses S/370 architecture hardware, but that runs a variety of OSes, not OS/360. Our ATC still uses IBM43xx machines, but I am not sure what OS. I guess these are around 1990 vintage?

By the same token, early versions of UNIX aren't used anywhere either, or DOS, for that matter. Things evolve, and I believe that the S/360 evolution continued through to 2000. [S/360 -> S/370 -> S/390]

OS/360 is a different matter; as it was written to support a specific hardware platform, it became extinct with it, although its legacy carried on.

Nihil:

The reason I thought it was paper cards was that in "20 years of Berkeley Unix" Marshall says that Multics was the first time you could use a computer with something other than a piece of paper or directly interact with your computer.

Also, VMS hasn't been around 40 years, it was started a year after The Ramones. (1975).

October 25, 1977 V1.0 Initial commercial release
April, 1980 V2.0 VAX-11/750

^Vax. It was started a few years earlier but wasn't actually released until 1977, when The Misfits came out. That's almost 10 years after Unix was done.

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Originally Posted by gore

ATMs here run either Windows or Linux. Depending of course where the thing is. (I've seen an ATM Blue Screen once.)

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Yeah the BlueScreen of Death!..:fpissed: well I too have seen one dispensing account notices blank:argue:!

but for all UNIX rocks!:drink:

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The reason I thought it was paper cards was that in "20 years of Berkeley Unix" Marshall says that Multics was the first time you could use a computer with something other than a piece of paper or directly interact with your computer.

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Either Marshall is wrong or you are misunderstanding him my friend.

If you take "piece of paper" in its broader sense of "external media" and "directly interact" as "realtime input" then I don't see any alternative method other than telepathy........................

We are talking a hardware issue here..............UNIX has nothing to do with it......please remember that software is written for hardware ..........not the other way round ;)

By "directly interact" I am guessing that you are thinking of the old analogue boxes............where you had to physically move plugs and switches rather than use a command language?

Now, if we change

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or directly interact

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to "and directly interact" it would make more sense?:confused:

gore old buddy, please remember that we are "two nations divided by a common language" [Winston Churchill] :D Only binary tells the truth...........

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When people talk about paper input, please don't forget the punched tape............typically using octal notation plus a parity bit.............

Now you have got me going, and I will have to scour all the junk in my loft to find my two single hole punches............yeah, we really used to do that sort of thing!!!!!

A direct quote from the DVD "20 Years of Berkelet Unix" :

"All the people working in the labs (After Multics) had to return to GCOS, which was a bit of a let down, after you'd been used to the concept that you could actually directly interact with your computer through something other than little pieces of paper with holes punched".

That's what he said, that Multics was through and basically people like being able to interact with their computer with something other than paper. This was before Unix.

EDIT:

I've been looking everywhere for something online to show this, but can't find a thing. I can find a part fo this like half way through, but nothing showing this part of the video.

MKM is a highly respected person in computing, and when he said that before Multics, there was nothing that let you actually interact with the computer other than with paper, I took it as truth. And also, IBM 360 was in 1967 I think? Unix was already being made at that time.

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And also, IBM 360 was in 1967 I think? Unix was already being made at that time.

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The 360 project started in 1965. First customer shipped was 1967. In 1965 IBM released the 2741 terminal. It was basically a selectric typewriter that directly (and digitally) interfaced with mainframes.

I believe unix dev was started after Bell Labs pulled out of the MIT PDP-8 dev project in 1969.

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Originally posted by gore
ATMs here run either Windows or Linux. Depending of course where the thing is. (I've seen an ATM Blue Screen once.)

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You're probably right about the actual ATMs - I should have specified. I believe that the underlying processing architecture (the "interbank" stuff) is OS/400-based (now iSeries), or at least used to be - definitely in Europe, not sure about the US.

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Originally Posted by Negative

You're probably right about the actual ATMs - I should have specified. I believe that the underlying processing architecture (the "interbank" stuff) is OS/400-based (now iSeries), or at least used to be - definitely in Europe, not sure about the US.

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I think you're correct on the iSeries. The bank I use is fairly open with what they're using (And it seems IBM is pretty high on that list even though all the computers the people inside are using, are Dells).

I think now it depends on the Bank, because even though my Bank uses a standard ATM system, I've seen a few around Michigan that are either REALLY old ones still in use where you don't have that nice touch screen that breaks and needs re-inforced covers and are mostly plain text, because people push on them in a way that would break most touch screens, or a few here and there that are like brand new with bright colors and graphics and I think they run XP, but I'm not sure. I know the ones located in one of the movie places here run on RedHat, but it's strange to see so many different ATMs in like a 15 block radius.

The ones you see in Gas Stations here are what appear to be some form of low end ATM that might or might not have a touch screen depending on where you are, and they have small SMALL printers inside that always seem to garble messages on the paper.

CSR:

From what I've been reading today, Unix was started right after MULTICS ended and they had a working version by 1968 or so, but didn't have any shipped anywhere but inside AT&T until a few years alter.

I have no real know how of 360 since I'm not a company, and haven't ever actually seen one in person. The only thing I had to go on was basically the net where a lot of pics showed paper punch.

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Originally posted by gore
they had a working version by 1968

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here's what Thompson and Ritchie say...
http://www.princeton.edu/~mike/expotape.htm
http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/

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Originally Posted by Cheap Scotch Ron

here's what Thompson and Ritchie say...
http://www.princeton.edu/~mike/expotape.htm
http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/

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I've seen the Bell one before, but the Princeton one I don't think I have. I always thought they had already started before 1969 because of it being usable in the same year. Does anyone else have the DVD "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix" ? It's really good. It's not like Revolution OS where you've got interviews an things, it's just Marshal Kirk on a stage speaking about Unix at the beginning and Multi User systems in general (The Manchester Project) and then he talks about Berkeley after he gets done with how it started. It's really funny too. Like in one part he says how Termcap entries were just horrible because Terminal companies could do any bizarre screen things they wanted knowing they could just always write a term-cap entry. He then says "Term-Cap DWARFED Sendmail configuration files" and of course everyone laughs.

I got it from the FreeBSD Mall, and I think you can get it from MKM's site too.

S/360 certainly shipped before Unix and yes:

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In 1965 IBM released the 2741 terminal. It was basically a selectric typewriter that directly (and digitally) interfaced with mainframes.

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There is one in that picture that I linked to.

The idea of paper tapes and cards was a reflection of the computer environment of the day. A lot of data preparation was by agencies and the processing by bureaux (shades of "cloud computing" :D) and paper tapes and punched cards were the most cost effective way of preparing and transporting the input data.

That's kind of neat, I didn't actually know there were actual Shells / Command lines back before Unix / MULTICS. I thought they started that idea. Ah well.

I know the KR-35 or whatever was what was considered a standard way to talk to Unix for a while. The New Line made physical movement. They talk about it briefly in "The Complete FreeBSD". Good book.

A couple of off topic but somewhat related items:

I believe it is also the 40th anniversary of Arpanet?

I read somewhere that Bletchley Park have just started to restore a 1951 computer used in our atomic weapons programme. It has 900 cold cathode tubes for memory which would be about 370 bytes by todays reckoning :D

It used paper tape for program storage, data input and output.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09..._to_bletchley/

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1....htm?s_cid=259

Basically it was no faster than a human with a mechanical calculator, but did not make mistakes and could run for days on end.

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Originally Posted by nihil

A couple of off topic but somewhat related items:

I believe it is also the 40th anniversary of Arpanet?

I read somewhere that Bletchley Park have just started to restore a 1951 computer used in our atomic weapons programme. It has 900 cold cathode tubes for memory which would be about 370 bytes by todays reckoning :D

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You know what? I would love to pay to see a demonstration of these paper/punch machines, especially the Apollo one's. And how the machines IBM produced work to help Germany track Jews and other minorities.

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Originally Posted by Linen0ise

You know what? I would love to pay to see a demonstration of these paper/punch machines, especially the Apollo one's. And how the machines IBM produced work to help Germany track Jews and other minorities.

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I think you mean the Nazis. Hitler was Austrian, and a lot of Germans didn't like him or the Nazis (Like MY family who fought on the American side against him) for fear of being killed for saying something against scheissekopf. That's why they refer to it as "Nazi Germany" because like with Bush, he may have been in charge but a lot of people in the country didn't like it. Of course we're allowed to speak poorly of Bush without someone killing us for it.... Gestapo would murder anyone who dared say anything bad about their ways or what they did. If you want to know where the Nazis who were let off went, well, check this side of the globe. Some got off scott free and a bunch ran down to Mexico.

Also, what other minorities are you speaking of? A mad man who stole his position before most of us were even born tried to tell everyone else that a certain race was better than another. Which is crap. Nihil would be speaking German right now had it not been for the fact that the HUMAN race beat the hell out of the master race.

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Originally Posted by gore

I think you mean the Nazis. Hitler was Austrian, and a lot of Germans didn't like him or the Nazis (Like MY family who fought on the American side against him) for fear of being killed for saying something against scheissekopf.

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I agree with your statements. But I referring to the technology back in the days. I wonder what can be accomplished with those ancient machines in a 8-hour workday. The Navy knows how I felt about Bush ;)

Well, as I see things, the IBM punchcard machine was the start of automated database management systems.

We already had manual stuff such as Cardex and Rotodeck, but this was the first electro-mechanical system. I also regard it as database management because it was driven by codes that allowed automatic sorting and selection, rather than just making the manual look up of records more efficient.

The paper tape computer I mentioned was actually no faster than a human over a short period of time. However, it could run 24/7 or until it ran out of paper tape; and it never got tired or made mistakes.

Back then we weren't looking at mips or megaflops..............we just wanted improvements on what were essentially tedious, repetitive, manual operations.

What the Germans used it for is pretty much irrelevant? hell! I have a Mauser '98 and have never killed anyone with it...........neither has anyone else to my knowledge ;)

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a bunch ran down to Mexico

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It was South America actually. The Germans already had expatriate populations and business interests down there.

Places like Paraguay, Uraguay, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina.

I spoke to someone recently who worked in finance who used those ancient machines at an automotive company. When they were bored, they programmed the machine to divide a million by 1. The computer worked all night trying to figure out the solution. Probably was exaggerating but definitely made a point.

LO,

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The computer worked all night trying to figure out the solution. Probably was exaggerating but definitely made a point.

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Sounds fast to me, given that it would subtract 1 from 1,000,000 one million times, computing a subtotal each time.

If "all night" is 8 hours, then it was doing around 35 calculations a second.

Try that with an add-listing calculator set to print subtotals :D even with repeat calculations turned on and just using the display, you won't be able to do more than 5 calculations a second?

Handling the paper input/output was certainly the bottleneck with those old devices. :)

God this thread makes me feel old.

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I would love to pay to see a demonstration of these paper/punch machines

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Gore you may appreciate this. The summer of my Freshman year in High School, I used to take a bus downtown to Wayne State and hang out in the computer lab. I was kind of the adopted geek kid and that summer I learned COBOL. Programs were written on coding forms, punched on to punch cards, and loaded into the computer.

You only dropped your stack of punch cards ONCE. Because there really wasn't anyway to put them back in order. It was easier to start over!

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God this thread makes me feel old

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I kinda know what you mean. I dont "feel" old, but as you read these kinda threads, you sure sound old.


My high school couldnt afford the punch card machines. As a freshman (1975) we had an IMSAI (8080 processor, 64K memory. It was a kit for approx $500.00). The senior class and a grad student that was teaching us assembled it. It had no keyboard interface. You programmed it using switches on the front panel. It ran CPM and a version of Basic. There was no way to store your program. Everytime you wanted to run it, you had to reprogram.

The next year they bought an "expansion unit". It allowed us to store our programs on cassette tapes.

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Originally Posted by dinowuff

God this thread makes me feel old.



Gore you may appreciate this. The summer of my Freshman year in High School, I used to take a bus downtown to Wayne State and hang out in the computer lab. I was kind of the adopted geek kid and that summer I learned COBOL. Programs were written on coding forms, punched on to punch cards, and loaded into the computer.

You only dropped your stack of punch cards ONCE. Because there really wasn't anyway to put them back in order. It was easier to start over!

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Wayne State? Wow man. I've seen the area by there a few times. It looks neat, but I wasn't even born when you were doing that. COBOL seems to have a huge following with some. I don't know personally anyone who uses it, but I know for a fact that not only are a lot of business apps running from it, but that even now people are using it for stuff like that, which is weird.

I just hate programming more or less heh. The only things I can say good about actual coding (Non HTML / scripts) is that Perl has a use, as does Python, and it may even be better, and that C is somethin I'd learn if I had the time and patience just because I could do anything with that, including do the OS I designed. And Assmebler... Can't forget good ol DIY Punk goals in coding lol.

Basically if it's not C, Assembler, Perl, Python, or MAYBE Java, I don't find use. That could be my in-experience in all things code, but there you go.

I have a certain amount of respect that doesn't require earning for anyone who can write Assembler (Like my Wife) or can do low level Kernel like things in C.

The Perl and Python, I find mainly interesting for the fact that using those, you can pretty much do anything non OS or Driver related. (By OS I mean Kernel stuff, which would probably not be the best idea in any language that's interpreted, though, it must be said, all languages are eventually interpreted ;) ).

You still anywhere around Wayne ? There seems to be more of us Michigan AO people these days. Back in 2002 it was basically me and Souleman. He lives up by Saginaw.

In 1971 I ran my first Fortran program on an IBM 1130 that was domiciled at my school (6 yr jr high/high school program)

Punch cards were cool. You had to run a card that basically said //FOR which told the system you were using Fortran. We discovered that it only read the //FOR so we changed the card to read //FORnication is fun

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Originally Posted by fourdc

In 1971 I ran my first Fortran program on an IBM 1130 that was domiciled at my school (6 yr jr high/high school program)

Punch cards were cool. You had to run a card that basically said //FOR which told the system you were using Fortran. We discovered that it only read the //FOR so we changed the card to read //FORnication is fun

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Lol, nice. Weren't you one of the guys that was on Bolt.com that I had invited here? The name you have here is the same as one of the guys from there that I invited here a long time ago.

Anyway, that's a nice one, because a lot of those machines, from what I've read, only checked the first couple letters to see what it was going to be, so it could ignore the rest as you got it to do, and you could have a little fun.

Think of you worked on it now, heh, you could make it "FORdc" ;)

I used to have a bunch of old Computer ads from like the 50s - 80s and I posted a link on here showing them once, but I have no clue where they are now. It would probably give some of you guys a nice trip to see that stuff again.

One of the ads I did keep was one of the Unix ones, and I kept a Microsoft Unix (Xenix) ad I found too. The rest I can't find though.

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Found it!

http://oldcomputers.net/oldads/old-computer-ads.html

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Originally Posted by gore

Lol, nice. Weren't you one of the guys that was on Bolt.com that I had invited here? The name you have here is the same as one of the guys from there that I invited here a long time ago.

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Gore, Im your father!

Seriously, I do not remember how in the world I found this site. I remember antionline.com in the back day that was a real hack place that stole code from other hackers. I remember antionline being hacked. and the only reason why this site was bought because of the builtin big brother crap. I knows. I used the handle 'KaOs" so I could track who was watching me\us.

bolts.com == Nuts & Bolts? That's how I learned make cables and hack analog cellphones. Their classified section made Craiglist look noobie.

Doing assembly language and advanced assembly language on 2 donated mainframes was the coolest thing for me. You had to wait under 1 hr to get a green-bar printout.

Except C\C++ the other crap they taught bored me. Teachers passed me just for hanging late hours helping the idiots pass.

I actually quoted Fourdc ;)

bolt.com was like... Sort of like a social networking site before those were everywhere. I got my very first computer in September of 1999 with Windows 95 (Was crap before I got it I know!) lol.

And I know this because I got the thing used from my Uncle, no manuals, nothing, and started screwing with it and got interested in it. Two weeks later I had hooked it up to the modem it came with and he was away so I saw him type his password to get online one day and memorized it, and when he was away two weeks later in another city, I got online since it was his machine and still had Prodigy Internet installed. I was hooked from there and went on Bolt.com which kept a profile I made, and it was in the middle of September 1999, so I had an exact date of when I first used computers heh.

darn u......same here.... Don't tell....they wont believe you. Prodigy was the real internet for our machines.

I found AO from a magazine that was about where the gurus go to get their solutions.

My first "internet" was a Commo 64, 300 baud and Delphi using Tymnet to avoid the long distance charges. I remember using Kermit for the file transfers.

I came across this place back when 2600 was half decent, if i remember in there defacement archive there was a comment about this place with a link, i clicked 'n joined up and have been here since.

thanks to the bright colours i slowly developed a :drink:problem though..:airoff: