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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

Is 'ancient UNIX' a term of art, or should I be offended?

Severo Ornstein called his memoir of the 1950s - 1970s Computing in the Middle Ages. Ornstein worked on SAGE, TX-2, LINC, and the Arpanet IMP among other things, before moving on to Xerox PARC.

https://worrydream.com/refs/Ornstein_2002_-_Computing_in_the...

Great read, but he undersells the weight of von Neumann's EDVAC report. If you haven't read that (which I imagine you have), it's crazy how prescient some of the lesser-known ideas are. He seemed to assume that we'd end up with some kind of neural architecture, and it's easy to imagine him being surprised that it took us this long to get serious about the idea.

Apropos of that, I couldn't resist telling Gemini 3 to run with your story prompt from the earlier thread: https://gemini.google.com/share/ac122aba6f7f. Thanks for the inspiration, apologies for following it. :-P

(Also thanks for posting the material you wrote back in the 1980s on the SCP initiative. I had heard of it as an SDI connection or component, but that was all. Reading through it now.)

Thanks! -- Jon

While exact definitions vary, it's a term of art for Research Unix ≤ V7, perhaps plus or minus a version, perhaps including contemporary derivatives.

I'm a Stargate fan, and I call everything created before 1980 Ancient Technology. I like how it sounds.

The Ancients had cool tech. Probably all running on Unix :P

Some of us are ancient enough to have been born before the last person walked on the moon.

Some of us are working day jobs in tech and remember the first guy.

Relatively speaking, any operating system from the 70s is "ancient".

What about from the 60s? Archaic?

https://www.unisys.com/product-info-sheet/ecs/clearpath-mast...

Anything with non keyboard input = prehistoric.

Is it at all possible to get a peak into that world as a curious person?

http://ibm1130.org/emu/

https://opensimh.org/simdocs/ibm1130_doc.html

Unisys not, but the one predating UNIX,

https://multicians.org/simulator.html

With Multics i'm familiar enough, i meant unisys specifically.

Not for free,

https://www.unisys.com/client-education/mcp-clearpath-server...

However you can get into the documentation for free,

NEWP manual, the systems language,

https://public.support.unisys.com/aseries/docs/ClearPath-MCP...

Overall documentation,

https://public.support.unisys.com/aseries/docs/ClearPath-MCP...

The original system back in 1960's,

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

I’d call basically anything before the mid 90s ancient, even though I was there and using it at the time, just because of how much of the way we use computers now has changed so drastically.

Amiga WB, Macs, Atari GEM, RiscOS... not that different.

How many of the operating systems that you listed remain as ways we use computers?

Even Macs were an entirely different codebase that didn’t even have memory protection or preemptive multitasking, which very much changed how you used it.

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