This is really cool. Reminds me of the original Unix was invented in a couple weeks while Ritchie's family went on vacation to CA to visit his in-laws.
Source: UNIX: A History and a Memoir Paperback – October 18, 2019
by Brian W Kernighan (Author)
But I think it’s relevant to say that before writing Unix he was working on Multics for a long time already. Unix was a “simplified” version of it, if I remember well. So it didn’t “spring out of thin air.”
Unix was a kind of play word for Unique as an anti-thesis for Multics that latter was originally designed for modern multi-user and multi-process OS. Ironically as any real-world OS Unix eventually becomes multi-user system similar to Multics but the name stucked. Granted Unix has a very simple (as in simple as possible but no simpler) multi-user permission and security system that work reliably for many decades until now. Of all the organizations NSA actually even come up with a better replacement for the modern Unix permission and security model with SELinux, but most users just ignored and disabled SELinux although it's installed by default by many major Linux distros [1].
[1] SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way:
I understood it was Unix for 'one mechanism' or 'unified' instead of the broad everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Multix approach. That was the joke I understood. Notthing about single-user.
I think you mean Ken Thompson. I can't be bothered searching through youtube interviews but I'm pretty shure that on more than one occasion, he tells a story something along the lines of having a disk driver, some programs, and maybe some other components. His wife went on a trip and he figured it would be enough time to fill in the gaps and make a complete OS.
Yes. But it is written in no edit stone now. I’m sorry for the future google searches in which this received top billing instead of Ken Thompson’s name.
I struggle like hell to imagine what the enduring lasting lessons of DOS are. It doesnt seem to have any real legacy in OS design. Not a single aspect but was copied or emulated or expanded on (although DOS in the whole was cloned purely for sale of having a DOS compatible system).
The lesson seems to be: it's a race to the bottom on price. The lesson seems to be: get lucky and have your competitor just happen to be on a trip the day IBM knocks at their door. The lesson seems to be: have a parent who sells your stuff direct the board. The lesson seems to be: take advantage of decades of now-non-existant anti-trust atmosphere to make the world's biggest computer company seek outside OS. DOS itself? I struggle to think of anything remarkable at all. Maybe the availability of very cheap BASIC on-ramps for enthusiasts.
> Not a single aspect but was copied or emulated or expanded on
The business computing world still, to this day, largely runs on Windows, and Windows NT was built on the foundations of DOS: it bootstraps from a DOS filesystem, as UEFI still does in 2024, and it could be installed from DOS. It implements an API designed on DOS for a DOS GUI and to this day supports DOS-compatible filenames.
All the core system folders in Windows 11 still have DOS-compatible names, from `SYSTEM32` to `SYSWOW64`.
DOS itself was emulated by DR-DOS, FreeDOS, PTS-DOS, and other OSes.
> it's a race to the bottom on price.
Always was, still is. Why do you think Linux does so well? It's not technical merit!
> have your competitor just happen to be on a trip the day IBM knocks at their door.
Absolutely cast-iron lie, and you should be ashamed of yourself for repeating it.
AFAIK Windows NT was mainly influenced by VMS (which Dave Cutler worked on before NT). The DOS-isms were mainly coming in via the Win95 side and for backward compatibility reasons, but I bet everybody on the NT team hated those requirements ;)
> Absolutely cast-iron lie, and you should be ashamed of yourself for repeating it.
Not the parent, but it's at best a good urban legend and not much different from "Gary Kildall was not interested". Do you have any first-person accounts that paint a different picture?
> The DOS-isms were mainly coming in via the Win95 side
Nope. Not true, and you have the timeline backwards.
NT was released in 1993, 2 years before Win95, and only the 2nd version of NT, 3.5, supported VFAT long file names.
NT did not support Win95B's FAT32 until its 5th release, Windows 2000.
> backward compatibility reasons, but I bet everybody on the NT team hated those requirements
No, I don't think so. NT could be installed on top of DOS, via the WINNT.EXE setup program. (Something I urged in OS/2 communities, but they didn't understand the need or usefulness.)
NT could dual-boot with DOS, even in the same partition in early versions. It could also dual-boot with Win9x.
This level of interop was hugely important and useful and really helped the new OS gain adoption. It was not some reluctant bolt-on.
> a good urban legend
No, it isn't. It's a horrid calumny against a good and brilliant man.
> not much different from "Gary Kildall was not interested".
Also utter nonsense.
> Do you have any first-person accounts that paint a different picture?
TL;DR version.
Dr Kildall's wife, Barbara McEwen, was DR's lawyer. She negotiated with clients and suppliers, not the CEO who was a programmer.
IBM wanted an NDA which DR was unwilling to do. She said no. Remember DR was the industry giant in microcomputer OSes at this time, and IBM didn't have an offering at all.
Kildall was flying to visit an important client; this wasn't some accidental joyride.
This lie about Kildall literally drove him to drink and his early death. Stop repeating it. It's not funny or clever. It's an evil, vindictive lie.
Tom Rolander was the other passenger in the plane. Is his testimony good enough?
The thing is, the computer industry is now old enough it has a lot of folklore and legend: stuff that "everyone knows" and repeats.
But many of the people involved are still alive and you can just ask them.
And there are some really nasty people in this industry -- such as Bill Gates, or Larry Ellison -- who tell lies about others and to others, and then some of those lies catch on and everyone repeats them.
These lies that people share destroy lives. Don't repeat stuff you heard. Just Google it. It's easy to find the truth.
I've heard this pitch too. My favorite is when a VC told me my expectations were "too high as 90% of us couldn't get a job at Goldman and that we are just content marketers" which I felt was wonderfully honest.
I often wonder if drones even need to look like they do or if there is a more efficient design that we don't use simply because "things that fly look like this" where "this" includes a place for a cockpit.
The basic design of wings sticking out from a pointy cylinder isn't going to change, because of aerodynamics.
But in the case of the Predator drone, for example, it didn't reduce the volume of the "cockpit" -- it expanded it into a big bulge to fit the satellite antenna and all of the sensors.
That's already happened, look at how many have a pusher prop configuration to balance out all the electronics and sensor equipment going where the cockpit used to be.
Such drones will not last long on the battlefield. The countermeasures for MITM drones is going to be brutal in the next 5 years after what we've seen in Ukraine. Russia has already been doing pretty well using ECM against Ukraine's drones. However, HIMARS has been employed effectively against jamming devices as well.
Low cost autonomous hunter killers as area denial munitions is going to be something else though. Once we no longer require man-in-the-middle these drones will be horrifying. You will be able to just say "Kill anything with these characteristics in this area at this time." Then leave the area and wait for the mayhem to begin. Think land mines that place themselves miles away and then get up out of their hole and then chase down whoever gets near enough.
Sold a company in 2014 that categorized 65M videos a month using a number of techniques such as object detection (soccer ball), scene classification (soccer pitch), and face recognition (Ronaldo). Used YouTube as a training ground. Marketed as ad words for video. Way ahead of its time. Did $60M in revenue the year after we sold it. Face. Palm.
I built something that used surveillance cams in warehouses in 2018 and almost got 25m for a subset of what our company did. I took those same ideas to some long-term connects and we turned it into something worth much more that to us.
Be glad about where you are knowing that you won't have to do as much as others to pay down your sins in this industry.
I wasn’t aware of this law so it may or may not be a good law. One thing I noticed was the statement that it will be offered at “no extra cost” which is a bizarre thing to say. Can’t a manufacturer of a large thing with many components just slightly increase the cost of each part to cover the cost of the required thing? What fantasy land do people have to live in to think that something will be forced on a company and that company won’t somehow make up the gap somewhere else? It’s not like airbags or rear view cameras are magically free.
It is/was a useful credential to have when responding to government RFPs as governments had purchased UNIX systems and wanted new systems to be interoperable. This might no longer be an advantage in most requests but my guess is there are still some that require it.
From the best to worst places for solar PV in the continental US is only a factor of 2 difference. People have really bad intuitions about this, possibly not accounting for the impact of heat.
It’s worth reading their new book which is a history of the group. The chat was launched at defcon last year at their birthday party and there will be more this year.
Source: UNIX: A History and a Memoir Paperback – October 18, 2019 by Brian W Kernighan (Author)
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