Hidden Early History of Unix
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UNIX and Computer Science Spreading UNIX Around the World: by Ronda Hauben an Interview with John Lions
Winter/Spring 1994 Celebrating 25 Years of UNIX Volume 6 No 1 "I believe all significant software movements start at the grassroots level. UNIX, after all, was not developed by the President of AT&T." Kouichi Kishida, UNIX Review, Feb., 1987 UNIX and Computer Science Spreading UNIX Around the World: by Ronda Hauben An Interview with John Lions [Editor's Note: This year, 1994, is the 25th anniversary of the [Editor's Note: Looking through some magazines in a local invention of UNIX in 1969 at Bell Labs. The following is university library, I came upon back issues of UNIX Review from a "Work In Progress" introduced at the USENIX from the mid 1980's. In these issues were articles by or inter- Summer 1993 Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. This article is views with several of the pioneers who developed UNIX. As intended as a contribution to a discussion about the sig- part of my research for a paper about the history and devel- nificance of the UNIX breakthrough and the lessons to be opment of the early days of UNIX, I felt it would be helpful learned from it for making the next step forward.] to be able to ask some of these pioneers additional questions The Multics collaboration (1964-1968) had been created to based on the events and developments described in the UNIX "show that general-purpose, multiuser, timesharing systems Review Interviews. were viable." Based on the results of research gained at MIT Following is an interview conducted via E-mail with John using the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), Lions, who wrote A Commentary on the UNIX Operating AT&T and GE agreed to work with MIT to build a "new System describing Version 6 UNIX to accompany the "UNIX hardware, a new operating system, a new file system, and a Operating System Source Code Level 6" for the students in new user interface." Though the project proceeded slowly his operating systems class at the University of New South and it took years to develop Multics, Doug Comer, a Profes- Wales in Australia. -
A Microkernel API for Fine-Grained Decomposition
A Microkernel API for Fine-Grained Decomposition Sebastian Reichelt Jan Stoess Frank Bellosa System Architecture Group, University of Karlsruhe, Germany freichelt,stoess,[email protected] ABSTRACT from the microkernel APIs in existence. The need, for in- Microkernel-based operating systems typically require spe- stance, to explicitly pass messages between servers, or the cial attention to issues that otherwise arise only in dis- need to set up threads and address spaces in every server for tributed systems. The resulting extra code degrades per- parallelism or protection require OS developers to adopt the formance and increases development effort, severely limiting mindset of a distributed-system programmer rather than to decomposition granularity. take advantage of their knowledge on traditional OS design. We present a new microkernel design that enables OS devel- Distributed-system paradigms, though well-understood and opers to decompose systems into very fine-grained servers. suited for physically (and, thus, coarsely) partitioned sys- We avoid the typical obstacles by defining servers as light- tems, present obstacles to the fine-grained decomposition weight, passive objects. We replace complex IPC mecha- required to exploit the benefits of microkernels: First, a nisms by a simple function-call approach, and our passive, lot of development effort must be spent into matching the module-like server model obviates the need to create threads OS structure to the architecture of the selected microkernel, in every server. Server code is compiled into small self- which also hinders porting existing code from monolithic sys- contained files, which can be loaded into the same address tems. Second, the more servers exist | a desired property space (for speed) or different address spaces (for safety). -
ROADS and BRIDGES: the UNSEEN LABOR BEHIND OUR DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE Preface
Roads and Bridges:The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure WRITTEN BY Nadia Eghbal 2 Open up your phone. Your social media, your news, your medical records, your bank: they are all using free and public code. Contents 3 Table of Contents 4 Preface 58 Challenges Facing Digital Infrastructure 5 Foreword 59 Open source’s complicated relationship with money 8 Executive Summary 66 Why digital infrastructure support 11 Introduction problems are accelerating 77 The hidden costs of ignoring infrastructure 18 History and Background of Digital Infrastructure 89 Sustaining Digital Infrastructure 19 How software gets built 90 Business models for digital infrastructure 23 How not charging for software transformed society 97 Finding a sponsor or donor for an infrastructure project 29 A brief history of free and public software and the people who made it 106 Why is it so hard to fund these projects? 109 Institutional efforts to support digital infrastructure 37 How The Current System Works 38 What is digital infrastructure, and how 124 Opportunities Ahead does it get built? 125 Developing effective support strategies 46 How are digital infrastructure projects managed and supported? 127 Priming the landscape 136 The crossroads we face 53 Why do people keep contributing to these projects, when they’re not getting paid for it? 139 Appendix 140 Glossary 142 Acknowledgements ROADS AND BRIDGES: THE UNSEEN LABOR BEHIND OUR DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE Preface Our modern society—everything from hospitals to stock markets to newspapers to social media—runs on software. But take a closer look, and you’ll find that the tools we use to build software are buckling under demand. -
An Automated Binary Security Update System for Freebsd
An Automated Binary Security Update System for FreeBSD Colin Percival Computing Lab, Oxford University [email protected] Abstract that a large number of people find the task of applying security patches and rebuilding affected programs to be difficult and/or confusing. Given that releases are on av- With the present trend towards increased reliance upon erage several months – and several security holes – old computer systems, the provision and prompt application by the time they are installed, the possibility arises that of security patches is becoming vital. Developers of all a new user will find his system compromised before he operating systems must generally be applauded for their has a chance to bring it up to date. success in this area; systems administrators, however, are often found lacking. Furthermore, there are some circumstances where build- ing from source is undesirable. Some embedded sys- Anecdotal evidence suggests that for FreeBSD much of tems might lack sufficient disk space to store the entire the difficulty arises out of the need to recompile from the source and object trees; some system administrators re- source code after applying security patches. Many peo- move part or all of the build toolchain in an (arguably ple, after spending years using closed-source point-and- misguided) attempt to thwart any attempt to build a click operating systems, find the concept of recompiling rootkit; and the purveyors of application-specific ‘toast- software to be entirely foreign, and even veteran users ers’ might very likely wish to keep the complexity of of open source software are often less than prompt about building from source entirely hidden from their users. -
Openvms Record Management Services Reference Manual
OpenVMS Record Management Services Reference Manual Order Number: AA-PV6RD-TK April 2001 This reference manual contains general information intended for use in any OpenVMS programming language, as well as specific information on writing programs that use OpenVMS Record Management Services (OpenVMS RMS). Revision/Update Information: This manual supersedes the OpenVMS Record Management Services Reference Manual, OpenVMS Alpha Version 7.2 and OpenVMS VAX Version 7.2 Software Version: OpenVMS Alpha Version 7.3 OpenVMS VAX Version 7.3 Compaq Computer Corporation Houston, Texas © 2001 Compaq Computer Corporation Compaq, AlphaServer, VAX, VMS, the Compaq logo Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Alpha, PATHWORKS, DECnet, DEC, and OpenVMS are trademarks of Compaq Information Technologies Group, L.P. in the United States and other countries. UNIX and X/Open are trademarks of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. All other product names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective companies. Confidential computer software. Valid license from Compaq required for possession, use, or copying. Consistent with FAR 12.211 and 12.212, Commercial Computer Software, Computer Software Documentation, and Technical Data for Commercial Items are licensed to the U.S. Government under vendor’s standard commercial license. Compaq shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. The information in this document is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind and is subject to change without notice. The warranties for Compaq products are set forth in the express limited warranty statements accompanying such products. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. -
To Type Or Not to Type: Quantifying Detectable Bugs in Javascript
To Type or Not to Type: Quantifying Detectable Bugs in JavaScript Zheng Gao Christian Bird Earl T. Barr University College London Microsoft Research University College London London, UK Redmond, USA London, UK [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—JavaScript is growing explosively and is now used in to invest in static type systems for JavaScript: first Google large mature projects even outside the web domain. JavaScript is released Closure1, then Microsoft published TypeScript2, and also a dynamically typed language for which static type systems, most recently Facebook announced Flow3. What impact do notably Facebook’s Flow and Microsoft’s TypeScript, have been written. What benefits do these static type systems provide? these static type systems have on code quality? More concretely, Leveraging JavaScript project histories, we select a fixed bug how many bugs could they have reported to developers? and check out the code just prior to the fix. We manually add The fact that long-running JavaScript projects have extensive type annotations to the buggy code and test whether Flow and version histories, coupled with the existence of static type TypeScript report an error on the buggy code, thereby possibly systems that support gradual typing and can be applied to prompting a developer to fix the bug before its public release. We then report the proportion of bugs on which these type systems JavaScript programs with few modifications, enables us to reported an error. under-approximately quantify the beneficial impact of static Evaluating static type systems against public bugs, which type systems on code quality. -
Using NROFF and TROFF
Using NROFF and TROFF Part Number: 800-1755-10 Revision A, of 9 May 1988 UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T. SunOS is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun Workstation is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Material in this manual comes from a number of sources: NrofflTroff User's Manual, Joseph F. Ossanna, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey; A Troff Tutorial, Brian W. Kernighan, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey; Typ ing Documents on the UNIXSystem: Using the -ms Macros with Troff and Nroff, M. E. Lesk, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey; A Guide to Preparing Documents with -ms, M. E. Lesk, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey; Document Formatting on UNIXUsing the -ms Macros, Joel Kies, University of California, Berkeley, California; Writing Papers with Nroff Using -me, Eric P. Allman, University of California, Berkeley; and Introducing the UNIXSystem, Henry McGilton, Rachel Morgan, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1983. These materials are gratefully acknowledged. Copyright © 1987, 1988 by Sun Microsystems, Inc. This publication is protected by Federal Copyright Law, with all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, translated, transcribed, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means manual, electric, electronic, electro-magnetic, mechanical, chemical, optical, or other wise, without prior explicit written permission from Sun Microsystems. Contents Chapter 1 Introduction . 1.1. nrof f andtrof f . Text Formatting Versus Word Processing TheEvolutionof nr of f andt ro f f Preprocessors and Postprocessors 1.2. tr of f, Typesetters, and Special-Purpose Formatters ............ 1.3. -
Introduction to Unix
Introduction to Unix Rob Funk <[email protected]> University Technology Services Workstation Support http://wks.uts.ohio-state.edu/ University Technology Services Course Objectives • basic background in Unix structure • knowledge of getting started • directory navigation and control • file maintenance and display commands • shells • Unix features • text processing University Technology Services Course Objectives Useful commands • working with files • system resources • printing • vi editor University Technology Services In the Introduction to UNIX document 3 • shell programming • Unix command summary tables • short Unix bibliography (also see web site) We will not, however, be covering these topics in the lecture. Numbers on slides indicate page number in book. University Technology Services History of Unix 7–8 1960s multics project (MIT, GE, AT&T) 1970s AT&T Bell Labs 1970s/80s UC Berkeley 1980s DOS imitated many Unix ideas Commercial Unix fragmentation GNU Project 1990s Linux now Unix is widespread and available from many sources, both free and commercial University Technology Services Unix Systems 7–8 SunOS/Solaris Sun Microsystems Digital Unix (Tru64) Digital/Compaq HP-UX Hewlett Packard Irix SGI UNICOS Cray NetBSD, FreeBSD UC Berkeley / the Net Linux Linus Torvalds / the Net University Technology Services Unix Philosophy • Multiuser / Multitasking • Toolbox approach • Flexibility / Freedom • Conciseness • Everything is a file • File system has places, processes have life • Designed by programmers for programmers University Technology Services -
Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix : from AT&T-Owned to Freely
Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix : From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable Marshall Kirk McKusick Early History Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie presented the first Unix paper at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Purdue University in November 1973. Professor Bob Fabry, of the University of California at Berkeley, was in attendance and immediately became interested in obtaining a copy of the system to experiment with at Berkeley. At the time, Berkeley had only large mainframe computer systems doing batch processing, so the first order of business was to get a PDP-11/45 suitable for running with the then-current Version 4 of Unix. The Computer Science Department at Berkeley, together with the Mathematics Department and the Statistics Department, were able to jointly purchase a PDP-11/45. In January 1974, a Version 4 tape was delivered and Unix was installed by graduate student Keith Standiford. Although Ken Thompson at Purdue was not involved in the installation at Berkeley as he had been for most systems up to that time, his expertise was soon needed to determine the cause of several strange system crashes. Because Berkeley had only a 300-baud acoustic-coupled modem without auto answer capability, Thompson would call Standiford in the machine room and have him insert the phone into the modem; in this way Thompson was able to remotely debug crash dumps from New Jersey. Many of the crashes were caused by the disk controller's inability to reliably do overlapped seeks, contrary to the documentation. Berkeley's 11/45 was among the first systems that Thompson had encountered that had two disks on the same controller! Thompson's remote debugging was the first example of the cooperation that sprang up between Berkeley and Bell Labs. -
Linux from Scratch Linux from Scratch
Linux From Scratch Linux From Scratch Table of Contents Linux From Scratch............................................................................................................................................1 Gerard Beekmans.....................................................................................................................................1 Dedication............................................................................................................................................................2 Preface................................................................................................................................................................10 Who would want to read this book..................................................................................................................11 Who would not want to read this book...........................................................................................................12 Organization......................................................................................................................................................13 Part I − Introduction...............................................................................................................................13 Part II − Installation of the LFS system.................................................................................................13 Part III − Appendixes.............................................................................................................................13 -
Lecture 1: Introduction to UNIX
The Operating System Course Overview Getting Started Lecture 1: Introduction to UNIX CS2042 - UNIX Tools September 29, 2008 Lecture 1: UNIX Intro The Operating System Description and History Course Overview UNIX Flavors Getting Started Advantages and Disadvantages Lecture Outline 1 The Operating System Description and History UNIX Flavors Advantages and Disadvantages 2 Course Overview Class Specifics 3 Getting Started Login Information Lecture 1: UNIX Intro The Operating System Description and History Course Overview UNIX Flavors Getting Started Advantages and Disadvantages What is UNIX? One of the first widely-used operating systems Basis for many modern OSes Helped set the standard for multi-tasking, multi-user systems Strictly a teaching tool (in its original form) Lecture 1: UNIX Intro The Operating System Description and History Course Overview UNIX Flavors Getting Started Advantages and Disadvantages A Brief History of UNIX Origins The first version of UNIX was created in 1969 by a group of guys working for AT&T's Bell Labs. It was one of the first big projects written in the emerging C language. It gained popularity throughout the '70s and '80s, although non-AT&T versions eventually took the lion's share of the market. Predates Microsoft's DOS by 12 years! Lecture 1: UNIX Intro The Operating System Description and History Course Overview UNIX Flavors Getting Started Advantages and Disadvantages Lecture Outline 1 The Operating System Description and History UNIX Flavors Advantages and Disadvantages 2 Course Overview Class Specifics 3 -
The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum Page 1 of 6
The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum Page 1 of 6 COMPUTING / SOFTWARE FEATURE The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix The classic operating system turns 40, and its progeny abound By WARREN TOOMEY / DECEMBER 2011 They say that when one door closes on you, another opens. People generally offer this bit of wisdom just to lend some solace after a misfortune. But sometimes it's actually true. It certainly was for Ken Thompson and the late Dennis Ritchie, two of the greats of 20th-century information technology, when they created the Unix operating system, now considered one of the most inspiring and influential pieces of software ever written. A door had slammed shut for Thompson and Ritchie in March of 1969, when their employer, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., withdrew from a collaborative project with the Photo: Alcatel-Lucent Massachusetts Institute of KEY FIGURES: Ken Thompson [seated] types as Dennis Ritchie looks on in 1972, shortly Technology and General Electric after they and their Bell Labs colleagues invented Unix. to create an interactive time- sharing system called Multics, which stood for "Multiplexed Information and Computing Service." Time-sharing, a technique that lets multiple people use a single computer simultaneously, had been invented only a decade earlier. Multics was to combine time-sharing with other technological advances of the era, allowing users to phone a computer from remote terminals and then read e -mail, edit documents, run calculations, and so forth. It was to be a great leap forward from the way computers were mostly being used, with people tediously preparing and submitting batch jobs on punch cards to be run one by one.