Journal: UNIX is Forty

Today is the Fortieth birthday of the original UNIX.

UNIX pervades the computer world and has influenced every single operating system ever developed since then. UNIX was also the first open computer system thanks to a U.S. Government decree forbidding its developer AT&T (then the government approved telecoms monopoly) from entering the computer market.

The classical UNIX operating system no longer exists in a usable form, but its decedents (both in terms of original code and otherwise) continue on in the form of the BSDs (which are actual Unices) and the popular clone "Linux".

It scarcely needs mentioning that without UNIX we would quite likely never have developed The Public Internet or even internetworking proper.

UNIX has remained the dominant operating system for serious people because its design and philosophy work best for the greatest number of situations, compared to other O.S.'s. Attempts to supercede UNIX have not been successful, even when the systems produced were allegedly superior.

The most instructive example of this is "Plan 9 From Bell Labs", named in punning reference to the notoriously horrendous Ed Wood film Plan 9 From Outer Space. Its name and bunny logo didn't actually help things either.

While many systems have been touted as being somehow superior to UNIX, Plan 9 was a rare instance of a system that actually was (at least in theory...) better than UNIX. It utterly failed to take off.

Plan 9's problem was that UNIX was imperfect. The "quite good" will always drive out the "somewhat better" even in the best of situations and in reality sysadmins could never quite shake the feeling that Plan 9 worked better in the lab than in real life. Eric S. Raymond famously said that Plan 9 "seemed to function mainly [...] for generating interesting papers [on designing] operating-systems". Unix was "good enough".

Also the open nature of UNIX allowed it to slowly assimilate the best of Plan 9's ideas, such as the proc pseudo-filesystem. That of course is the future of UNIX the absorption of an everlasting stream of new ideas.

Happy Birthday, UNIX.

<< Amarok Replacement | News Index | Introducing the Knowledge Base >>

News & Notes is the a journal of The Vistua Network Administration and the factuality of this content is guaranteed. From time-to-time, this content may contain normative statements or set policy.