Back in the Day: Unix, Minix and Linux | Hacker News Reader

Back in the Day: Unix, Minix and Linux

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113 pointsindigodaddy35 comments

Articles like this always make me feel like I missed out on all the geek going on in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Of course I was a toddler when Xerox PARC was demonstrating their UI to Steve Jobs, and was in middle school when Linus was posting about his "(free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

So as I enter mid-life, I realize just how much I missed either not being old enough, not paying attention enough, or not having the means to get in the game. These stories of tech history, if nothing else, provide motivation for those, like myself, to get into the game and work on something useful -- and most of all something fun.

Better to ask what you can be part of now than worrying about what you missed.

The shape of computing has changed a bit since then but there's still a lot of very interesting work now and going forward.

But I totally get it... I've felt that way before about tech and music. In the case of music I spent so many years only paying attention to rock from the 70's, 80's and 90's and telling myself music was dead now, but it is not... it's just different and needs to be discovered.

Before that time you needed very big iron to do much at all, so unless you were in the right place, as well as the right time, it was hard to participate.

I began on 8-bit micros (assemler...an assembler woulda been a luxury to us...we typed in machine code and calculated negative offsets in us heads..+) and also a PDP-11/45 running V7 when I was in middle school. My perception is that prior to the 11/45, 11/70 generation I would have had to have been very lucky to have a usable computer to program. Having said that, I remember learning Pascal over one summer holiday when I was a kid, but I had no computer capable of running a Pascal compiler until a couple of years later.

+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE

Well, I would have been in 4th grade when Linux was posting about his free operating system, and we had an XT at home. My sister went to college in '93, so we gave her our old computer and got a brand-new 486/33. In 93 I was BBSing; 94 had a shell account, 95 had Linus' "hobby" installed on the family PC.. So I guess that was 8th/9th grade.

But I, too, often feel I "missed out". I guess it's part of the human condition :)

I got on board with Slackware[0] 3 for 80386. Tried Minix a couple of times, also FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. Linux killed them due to community. Among other luminaries I met with Jon 'Maddog' Hall[1] a couple of times around 2000-2001, once in Sydney and once in Taiwan. We had various discussions, and I recall he said Linux was going to be "huge" in embedded. In 2008, Android happened. Fast forward another 10 years and now I am in China running a hardware company, and we're yet to see an open mobile offering. Even as my company have migrated from Linux to smaller microcontrollers for most tasks, and as computing and electronics at all layers continue to seep in to the rest of society causing massive changes (social networking, consumer-first walled garden devices, connected TV, mobile payment, everything-aaS etc.) on unsuspecting, status-quo industries, it's interesting to reflect on the continued significance of Linux's culture in shaping the technical community.

I don't in any way miss the hardware and bandwidth limitations of those days... but sometimes not having a billion examples on tap forced you to engage more deeply or distinctly with system fundamentals.

[0] Today I am a supporter of Gentoo (IMHO the 'spiritual successor' to Slackware) and NixOS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer)

"Since nowadays GNU without Linux isn't hugely helpful, it's basically just been assimilated into core Linux and just about every distro of Linux includes GNU utilities or GNU versions of common UNIX-born tools."

Nowadays, GNU compiler collection with or without Linux can be hugely helpful. e.g., it's basically just been assimilated into "core BSD" and just about every distribution compiles with GCC.

Even in the case of one "distro" where it was recently removed from "core" and replaced with clang, it is still easily added back from the ports/packages collection.

AFAIK freebsd has depricated gcc in favour of clang, and openbsd as well. Not sure about netbsd - I think there was some experiments with pcc?

Yeah well, but clang still has ugly corners. Take for example recent FPU bug on FreeBSD i386. GCC does not have it.

AFAIK, still can compile FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD or DragonflyBSD for all architectures using GCC.

> it's basically been assimilated into every distribution of BSD.

So that should be called GNU/BSD right, anyway why haven't I heard about the LiGNUx naming before is it some kind of pseudostallmanism?

Doesn't every major GNU tool have a clean-room implementation in BSD? Or I guess it would be more correct to say that BSD and GNU are both clean-room implementations of the original UNIX tools. Just thinking of the oft-posted, "Why GNU grep is fast" article.[0]

[0]https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug...

I'm not sure there are any major "gnu tools"? There are gnu flavored posix tools.

I'm not saying the gnu project isn't great (and I can't stand being constrained to posix tools without gnu extensions) - but the tools are generally from unix/posix?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy

Isn't Clang the default compiler on FreeBSD, now?

I see that Linux and MacOS run Unix dervied kernels.

I dont see how Windows does so. Its heritage is more along the line of VMS.

https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...

Unless he means the Windows Subsystem for Linux but it is my understanding that it is not runing a Linux kernel, but mapping to the Windows (NT) kernel.

ytwj your comment has been killed for some reason and I don't have enough karma to vouch it.

There was some BSD code for the network stack in Windows 95. This was all legal and license compatible. I'm pretty sure it was gone by the next windows version.

Didn't windows used to distribute BSD code? The old EULAs used to mention the regents of berkley. Was that the Windows kernel or some network stack?

Yes, the Windows TCP/IP stack was from BSD. I'm not sure if the code is still in Windows, but I think it is still configured via an etc/hosts file. I believe the BSD licence was preferable to Microsoft (as it was to Apple who based OSX on BSD). The networking stack was supposedly better on BSD than Linux too, but I'm not sure how correct that is (but I did hear that the software company I set up a website for in the mid 1990s switched from Linux to NetBSD pretty much as soon as I left for that reason).

I suspect he means the WSL given the context of the previous sentence.

WSL provides a Linux-compatible kernel interface developed by Microsoft (containing no Linux kernel code)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

I love historical pieces about technology. There's so much new and shiny all the time in tech, it's nice to reflect on where we've been.

Makes me want to re-watch Bryan's talk at Monktoberfest a few years ago on oral tradition in tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw

Here are a couple of good places to start.

https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/

https://archive.org/search.php?query=xerox

Change the previous query to any company or research institute, e.g. Burroughs, Apple, ETHZ, Borland and so forth.

Network; TCP or something

> PARC had computers where multiple programs were on the screen simultaneously in "windows", and there was a pointer device used to control them—so cool. Doug Englebart was inspired too; he went back to Stanford Research Institute and invented the mouse to make control of those windows easier.

Is that right? Doug Englebart invented mouse in 1963. Unlikely PARC had any windowing system capable machine around that period.

UPDATE: PARC was founded 1970. So the influence should definitely be inversed.

Yes, it's completely backwards. http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY

That was an awesome article. Fun to read.

What makes the minix operating system special?

MINIX was special because the book was used in many universities to teach operating system principles.

MINIX also one of the few affordable Unix-like operating systems you could run on your own PC, and it came with full source (except for the compiler)

Linus was running MINIX when he created Linux.

And finally there the famous discussion by Linus and Andy Tanenbaum (the creator of MINIX) about how operating systems should be structured.

Minix also runs Intel Management Engine in ring -3 on every CPU where it is enabled. That makes it one of the most deployed OS in the world.

Although this is Minix3 AFAIK which is quite different from the original Minix, with more BSD derived code, and designed for production not teaching.

In additional what phicoh said, it's also one of the most popular OS in the world.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3236064/minix-the-most-...

Maybe not most popular but definitely most deployed

It's a working BSD licensed Unix like OS with a microkernel. Solid enough that Intel uses it for their management processors.

I think these features make it special: https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=www:documentation:reliab...

Note that there is quite a big difference in goals between the MINIX versions that were current when Linus started writing Linux (i.e. MINIX 2.0 and earlier) and the MINIX3 project.

For early versions of MINIX the goal was teaching. Many limitations were left in place, both to keep the system simple and leave space for assignments for undergraduate students.

Many people in the MINIX community went to the Linux community because Andy Tanenbaum would usualy reject patches and Linus would welcome them.

Way later the MINIX3 project was created as research project. It has many cool ideas.

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