Unix Turns 50

Kubernetes/orchestration/microservices is in this category imo. In a cloud environment, most of the facilities provided by the linux kernel are outsourced to the orchestration layer: security/access, process scheduling, persistence.

What do you think of Fuchsia?

Why an MIT-license? The Linux project flourished because the GPL license forced upstream improvements right?

I'm not sure that the MIT-license would have had the same impact on an opensource OS...

The problem with most research operating systems is the benefits are only achievable by rewriting userspace applications as well to take advantage. Given how long it takes to write a desktop environment and a web browser, it's not really surprising there isn't wider adoption.

What specifically do you want that can't be done as an extension to an existing GPL or BSD operating system?

Have you looked into Haiku? www.haiku-os.org it is an active reimplementation of BeOS and is in a fairly usable state.

No one's mentioned Hurd?

I agree with Rob Pike that stated that systems software research is a dead end ... why reinvent yet another Unix like kernel in some C like language (Rust)

I want the Bill Gates intelligent software agents and way better sofware development tools (no-code is interesting).

What about Plan 9? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

iOS, Android and ChromeOS expose very little POSIX to userspace.

iOS has even been dropping parts of it, e.g. the new network stack.

But yeah, non-UNIX ideas on new OS research are more than welcomed.

Even worse is the security model of Unix: Users are considered a threat and are isolated, code is seen as trusted by the user and exploits are not considered.

The reality today are single user systems (And even if there are users, like for web services, the Unix user system is not used), where the code often cannot be trusted and almost always is exploitable.

The Xerox Workstation OSes (Mesa, Mesa/Cedar, Interlisp-D, Smalltalk) were the ones ahead of their time.

Bell-Labs is originally Bell System, then AT&T. Then AT&T spins Lucent Technologies. Lucent merges with Alcatel. Nokia buys Alcatel-Lucent 2016.

Question, how does it compare to Unix? It seems to be a mainframe OS.

time_t originally counted jiffies (60 per second) and was reset several times in the early 1970s before is was changed to count seconds. This makes it hard to interpret filesystem timestamps preserved in early Unix dumps. The 1970 epoch was chosen when Unix was a few years old, as a convenient round number.

I think the date is random. The bell labs page doesn't say that the birthday is today.

I feel like there should be a "UNIX Birthday observed." And the 50th would be January 1st, 2020, natch.

Probably the same reason that most people still drive horseless carriages, like they have done for over 120 years.

We haven't found anything newer yet that works as well in both cases.

50 years ago, Unix came from the future and showed us that less is more, and a good collection of composable tools can take you an awful long way. Along the way it’s evolved, demonstrating its flexibility and also suffered campaigns[0][1] by juggernauts like Microsoft demonstrating its durability. It (Linux - Potayto potahto.) runs every single super computer in the TOPS[2] ranking (500 entries) and has for the last 4 years.

I don’t actually know what iOS is, architecturally, but we know Android is also Unix (Linux), so it’s everywhere, serving us pretty well.

What’s not to like? What would you suggest instead?

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/scalability-day-falls-short/

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500

It fits in my head.

Because it is great!

Vaccines are older than Apollo, yet we still depend proudly on them.

The written language is even older, and it is still the justified source of a lot of human pride.

I've learnt to become proficient on the Unix command line and vi over 30 years ago (on the company's own System V port, no less!). Best investment ever! Not only is it the environment most suited for development tasks, it also is consistently present on all systems I've worked on since. Navigating around Unix has long become part of my spinal chord/muscle memory. I can't count how many times I've heard the "man, we don't do the command line thing these days" meme. Like in late 90s from Windows fanboys. Or in 2000s from Java geeks who only knew their Java IDE and nothing else. Yet here we are working with clouds, containers, and FaaS based on POSIX principles.

Is newer always better?

Why would you not be though?

People are not using 50 year old operating systems. It's not as if Linux or macOS today are the same as Unix even in the 90's! People are proud that certain ideas have persisted 50 years. People are proud because many things beyond Linux and macOS can be traced to Unix and the philosophy it holds, but also Unix's place in the broader story of computing history. Bell Labs, Thompson, Ritchie and many more played foundational roles. Like any other anniversary, it's nice to look back and reflect and celebrate.

Because the great idea never gets old.

Because the Apollo era was awesome.

That's like asking "Why are people proud to be using an Apollo-era pathfinding algorithm?". If it works, it works. The only reason that fashion is so fast in the tech world is that we have not really built many things that stand the test of time. Unix, for all its flaws, is one of these things.

Also, the Apollo era has some of the most amazing engineering achievements ever. Don't know why you would need to look down on that.

Sneaky edit :p

It's not an Apollo era OS though, any more than a new car is a 50 year old car.

They're both recognisably the same thing, but worlds apart - and have grown hugely in weight, power and included extras. I'm quite happy to find I don't have to keep relearning the basics of either. Whether car pedals in same place each time, or ps switches.