The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
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The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
1–10 of 13 posts
Re: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
#2The rebellious nature of Unix sharing in the early days taught an important lesson for would-be sharers today: either take pains to make sure your software can be used by anyone who wants to, or risk being shackled by lawyers and corporations who don't want it to be used.
Re: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
#3other than unix (clearly) being one of the most important technological leaps forward in computing, which is just a given at this point, well, that pic is just awesome!
Re: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
#4I can't remember a time before CVS (and now DVCS). Distributing patches via geocache sounds awesome.
Re: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
#5Not to nitpick on the author. But 16KB was quite a bit memory in early 1970's.
Re: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
#6Not to nitpick on the author. But 16KB was quite a bit memory in early 1970's.
Indeed: 147456 (probably plus some for parity; not sure what the PDP-7 memory bus looked like) tiny little beads threaded onto tiny wires by human beings. That amount of memory in an SRAM array (almost a million transistors!) was unthinkable in a minicomputer, and DRAM had just been invented and was even more expensive than core.
Re: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
#7Ok. Awesome article. Even more awesome that I didn't have to click "next page" 12 times.
Re: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
#8I can't remember a time before CVS (and now DVCS). Distributing patches via geocache sounds awesome.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." —Tanenbaum, Andrew S.
Re: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
#9I can't remember a time before CVS (and now DVCS). Distributing patches via geocache sounds awesome.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet#In_media
The latency is the problem, not the bandwidth.
(By the way, considered as a means of transferring information sex has lots of bandwidth, too. Not, yet, useful for sharing patches, though.)
Re: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
#10> By the mid-1970s, the environment of sharing that had sprung up around Unix resembled the open-source movement so prevalent today.
Not sure what percentage of today's open-source movement has an environment of sharing. Much of it is cathedrals in bazaar's clothing.