Unix

Book - Unix: A History and a Memoir Recently, I read this fantastic book. It bring me back to that 1960s - a period without modern computer and how the most clever minds in this world changed the world. During the reading, I found many answers to the “why” questions I had when I learning linux system. AT&T built Bell Labs and invited some of the most brilliant people in the world to do the most advanced scientific work. There was no limit on funding and no fixed goals for individuals. The system developed before Unix was called Multics. Since “Multics” already used “multi,” the early name of Unix was “Unics.” Unix was first written on the PDP-7. The next version, written in C, was developed on the PDP-11. Fortunately, it wasn’t written for the PDP-10. Tools like the shell, grep, regular expressions, the C language, the C compiler, yacc, lex, make, sed, awk, and troff were all invented at Bell Labs. Unix eventually declined due to copyright issues. AT&T sold it as a product and made it proprietary, which gave rise to open-source Unix-like systems. GNU is a Unix-like project that provides free and open-source alternatives. Under the GNU license, if you modify the source code of a project, the modified version must also remain open-source. MacOS is based on BSD, which is a Unix-like system. The Linux kernel combined with GNU forms GNU/Linux. They both follow POSIX. In the early days, operating systems were not portable. This changed with the invention of the C language and its compiler. MINIX was widely used because it was embedded in Intel chips. The working environment at Bell Labs in the 1970s are of hard problems, brilliant colleagues with shared dreams, and a unique management style that encouraged innovation. Microsoft once had its 3own Unix-like system. Another completely different path from Unix was MS-DOS, which eventually evolved into today’s Windows. You can also get to know the geniuses of that era, like Ken Thompson, Richard Stallman, and Brian Kernighan. “Everything is a file” is one of the core principles of Unix. The KISS principle (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”) is a fundamental part of Unix philosophy. The UNIX philosophy is very similar to some programming concepts I’ve recently learned at university. That’s why, Its impact not only on system desisgn but also software deveopemnt and beyond. ...