history

Back in the Day: UNIX, Minix and Linux

Dave Taylor — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:00:00 +0000

Columnist Dave Taylor reminisces about the early days of UNIX and how Linux evolved and grew from that seed.

Twenty five years of Linux Journal. This also marks my 161st column with the magazine too, which means I've been a part of this publication for almost 14 years. Where does the time go?

In honor of the historical significance of this issue, I wanted to share some of my memories of the very early days of UNIX, Minix and Linux. If you're a regular reader of my column, you'll recall that I'm in the middle of developing a mail merge Bash utility, but that'll just have to wait until next time. I promise, the shell ain't going anywhere in the meantime!

Back in the Day

I first stepped foot on campus at UC San Diego in late 1980, a declared computer science major. At that point, a lot of our compsci program was based on UCSD Pascal on Apple II systems. I still have fond memories of floppy drives and those dorky, pixelated—but oh so fun!—Apple II games we'd play during lab time.

For more serious classes, however, we had some big iron—a mainframe with accounts and remote computer lab terminals set up in designated rooms. The operating system on those systems? UNIX—an early version of BSD UNIX is my guess. It had networking using a modem-to-modem connection called UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Protocol, or UUCP. If you wanted to send email to someone, you used addresses where it was:


unique-hostname ! unique-hostname ! account

I don't remember my UCSD email address, but some years later, I was part of the admin team on the major UUCP hub hplabs, and my email address was simply hplabs!taylor.

Somewhere along the way, networking leaped forward with TCP/IP (we had TCP/IP "Bake Offs" to test interoperability). Once we had many-to-many connectivity, it was clear that the "bang" notation was unusable and unnecessarily complicated. We didn't want to worry about routing, just destination. Enter the "@" sign. I became taylor@hplabs.com.

Meanwhile, UNIX kept growing, and the X Window System from MIT gained popularity as a UI layer atop the UNIX command line. In fact, X is a public domain implementation of the windowing system my colleagues and I first saw at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. PARC had computers where multiple programs were on the screen simultaneously in "windows", and there was a pointer device used to control them—so cool. Doug Englebart was inspired too; he went back to Stanford Research Institute and invented the mouse to make control of those windows easier. At Apple, they also saw what was being created at PARC and were inspired to create the Macintosh with all its windowing goodness.

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Open Source Is Eternal

Glyn Moody — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Glyn Moody

Open source has won the present, but what about the future?

In the March 2018 issue of Linux Journal, I wrote an article taking a look back over the previous decade. An astonishing amount has changed in such a short time. But as I pointed out, perhaps that's not surprising, as ten years represents an appreciable portion of the entire history of Linux and (to a lesser extent) of the GNU project, which began in August 1991 and September 1983, respectively. Those dates makes the launch of Linux Journal in April 1994 an extremely bold and far-sighted move, and something worth celebrating on its 25th anniversary.

For me, the year 1994 was also memorable for other reasons. It marked the start of a weekly column that I wrote about the internet in business—one of the first to do so. In total, I produced 413 "Getting Wired" columns, the last one appearing in April 2003. I first mentioned Linux in February 1995. Thereafter, free software and (later) open source become an increasingly important thread running through the columns—the word "Linux" appeared 663 times in total. Reflecting on the dotcom meltdown that recently had taken place, which wiped out thousands of companies and billions of dollars, here's what I wrote in my last Getting Wired column:

The true internet did not die: it simply moved back into the labs and bedrooms where it had first arisen. For the real internet revolution was driven not by share options, but by sharing—specifically, the sharing of free software.

...

The ideas behind free software—and hence those that powered the heady early days of the internet—are so ineluctable, that even as powerful a company as Microsoft is being forced to adopt them. Indeed, I predict that within the next five years Microsoft will follow in the footsteps of IBM to become a fervent supporter of open source, and hence the ultimate symbol of the triumph of the internet spirit.

You can read that final column online on the Computer Weekly site, where it originally appeared. It's one of several hundred Getting Wired columns still available there. But the archive for some years is incomplete, and in any case, it goes back only to 2000. That means five years' worth—around 250 columns—are no longer accessible to the general public (I naturally still have my own original files).

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What Linux Journal's Resurrection Taught Me about the FOSS Community

Kyle Rankin — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

"Marley was dead, to begin with."—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

As you surely know by now, Linux Journal started in 1994, which means it has been around for most of the Linux story. A lot has changed since then, and it's not surprising that Linux and the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community are very different today from what they were for Linux Journal's first issue 25 years ago. The changes within the community during this time had a direct impact on Linux Journal and contributed to its death, making Linux Journal's story a good lens through which to view the overall story of the FOSS community. Although I haven't been with Linux Journal since the beginning, I was there during the heyday, the stroke, the decline, the death and the resurrection. This article is about that story and what it says about how the FOSS community has changed.

It's also a pretty personal story.

A Bit about Me

Although it's true that I sometimes write about personal projects in my articles and may disclose some personal details from time to time, I generally try not to talk too much about my personal life, but as it's useful to frame this story, here we go. I grew up in an era when personal computers were quite expensive (even more so, now that I account for inflation), and it wasn't very common to grow up with one in your home.

In high school, I took my first computer class in BASIC programming. This class fundamentally changed me. Early on in the class I knew that I wanted to change any past career plans and work with computers instead. My family noticed this change, and my grandparents and mother found the money to buy my first computer: a Tandy 1000 RLX. Although there certainly were flashier or more popular computers, it did come with a hard drive (40MB!), which was still pretty novel at the time. Every time I learned a new BASIC command in school, I would spend the following evenings at home figuring out every way I could use that new-found knowledge in my own software.

I never got internet access during high school (my mom saw the movie WarGames and was worried if I had internet access, I might accidentally trigger a house call from the FBI). This just made it all the more exciting when I went to college and not only got a modern computer, but also high-speed campus internet! Like most people, I was tempted to experiment in college. In my case, in 1998 a neighbor in my dorm brought over a series of Red Hat 5.1 floppies (the original 5.1, not RHEL) and set up a dual-boot environment on my computer. The first install was free.

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Why Linux Is Spelled Incorrectly

Bryan Lunduke — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 13:15:15 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

You ever see an injustice in the world—one so strong, so overwhelming—that, try as you might, you just can't ignore it? A crime that dominates your consciousness beyond all others? That drives you, even in the face of certain defeat, to action?

Mine is...Linux.

Not the existence of Linux. Linux is amazing. Linux powers the world. Linux is, as the kids say, totally tubular.

It's the name. It's the name that makes me Hulk out. Specifically, it's that confounded "X". It just plain should not be there.

Linux should be spelled L-I-N-U-C-S. Linucs.

Seriously.

That's not a joke.

To make my case for why I believe this, with every fiber of my being, let's start by understanding why "Linux" has that X in the first place. It happened back in the early 1990s, when the first snapshot of Linucs (ahem) code was first uploaded to an FTP server.

Back then, Linus Torvalds wanted to name his kernel "Freax" ("Free" + "Freak" + "Unix"). Linus felt naming the kernel after himself would be a bit, you know, weird. A friend of his disagreed, and when he uploaded the source, he named the folder "Linux".

See that "X" there at the end? It was meant to represent the "X" in UNIX. There's just one problem with that.

UNIX was never supposed to have an "X" in the name at all.

You see, "UNIX" originally was spelled U-N-I-C-S, which stands for UNiplexed Information and Computing Service. This was, itself, based off the name for an operating system made by some of the same folks—Multics (MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service).

(Note: neither Unics or Multics is spelled with an "X".)

The people that created, engineered and ran the project named it "Unics", and, here's the kicker, nobody is 100% sure where that X even came from. I cover the topic a bit further in my video "The Complete History of Linux (Abridged)" around the five-minute mark. But, the gist is this: the most viable, detailed theory for "the X" is that "maybe someone in PR did it?"

In other words, Linucs—possibly the most critical and valuable piece of software in human history—is incorrectly named "Linux" because an unknown person may or may not have accidentally written Unics as "UNIX" once. Maybe. We're not really sure.

But, because everyone else uses the X, so must I. In every article. Every video. Every presentation.

Whenever I write the word "Linux"—which is about 80 bajillion times every day—I let out a whisper-quiet, short, tortured scream, followed by a subtle wimper of defeated acceptance. If you've ever seen me at a conference, writing an article on my laptop, now you know why I look like a completely insane person.

It's that stupid, friggin' X.

So. There you have it.

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Best Linux Marketing Campaigns

Bryan Lunduke — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 13:00:00 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

I have long held the opinion that one of the biggest problems holding back Linux-based systems from dominating (market-share-wise) in the desktop computing space...is marketing. Our lack of attention-grabbing, hearts-and-minds-winning marketing is, in my oh-so-humble opinion, one of the most glaring weaknesses of the Free and Open Source Software world.

But, in a way, me saying that really isn't fair.

The reality is that we have had some truly fantastic marketing campaigns through the years. A few even managed to break outside our own Linux-loving community. Let's take a stroll through a few of my favorites.

From my vantage point, the best marketing has come from two places: IBM (which is purchasing Red Hat) and SUSE. Let's do this chronologically.

IBM's "Peace. Love. Linux."

Back in 2001, IBM made a major investment in Linux. To promote that investment, obviously, an ad campaign must be launched! Something iconic! Something catchy! Something...potentially illegal!

Boy, did they nail it.

"Peace. Love. Linux." Represented by simple symbols: a peace sign, a heart and a penguin, all in little circles next to each other. It was visually pleasing, and it promoted happiness (or, at least, peace and love). Brilliant!

IBM then paid to have more than 300 of these images spray-painted across sidewalks all over San Francisco. The paint was supposed to be biodegradable and wash away quickly. Unfortunately, that didn't happen—many of the stencils still were there months later.

And, according to the mayor, "Some were etched into the concrete, so, in those cases, they will never be removed."

The response from the city was...just as you'd expect.

After months of discussion, the City of San Francisco fined Big Blue $100,000, plus any additional cleanup costs, plus legal fees.

On the flip-side, the stories around it made for a heck of a lot of advertising!

IBM's "The Kid"

Remember the Linux Super Bowl ad from IBM? The one with the little boy sitting in a room of pure white light?

"He's learning. Absorbing. Getting smarter every day."

When that hit in 2004, it was like, whoa. Linux has made it. IBM made a Super Bowl ad about it!

"Does he have a name? His name...is Linux."

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Linux and Supercomputers

Bryan Lunduke — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 13:00:00 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

As we sit here, in the year Two Thousand and Eighteen (better known as "the future, where the robots live"), our beloved Linux is the undisputed king of supercomputing. Of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, approximately zero of them don't run Linux (give or take...zero).

The most complicated, powerful computers in the world—performing the most intense processing tasks ever devised by man—all rely on Linux. This is an amazing feat for the little Free Software Kernel That Could, and one heck of a great bragging point for Linux enthusiasts and developers across the globe.

But it wasn't always this way.

In fact, Linux wasn't even a blip on the supercomputing radar until the late 1990s. And, it took another decade for Linux to gain the dominant position in the fabled "Top 500" list of most powerful computers on the planet.

A Long, Strange Road

To understand how we got to this mind-blowingly amazing place in computing history, we need to go back to the beginning of "big, powerful computers"—or at least, much closer to it: the early 1950s.

Tony Bennett and Perry Como ruled the airwaves, The Day The Earth Stood Still was in theaters, I Love Lucy made its television debut, and holy moly, does that feel like a long time ago.

In this time, which we've established was a long, long time ago, a gentleman named Seymour Cray—whom I assume commuted to work on his penny-farthing and rather enjoyed a rousing game of hoop and stick—designed a machine for the Armed Forces Security Agency, which, only a few years before (in 1949), was created to handle cryptographic and electronic intelligence activities for the United States military. This new agency needed a more powerful machine, and Cray was just the man (hoop and stick or not) to build it.

Figure 1. Seymour Cray, Father of the Supercomputer (from http://www.startribune.com/minnesota-history-seymour-cray-s-mind-worked-at-super-computer-speed/289683511

This resulted in a machine known as the Atlas II.

Weighing a svelte 19 tons, the Atlas II was a groundbreaking powerhouse—one of the first computers to use Random Access Memory (aka "RAM") in the form of 36 Williams Tubes (Cathode Ray Tubes, like the ones in old CRT TVs and monitors, capable of storing 1024 bits of data each).

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Understanding Bash: Elements of Programming

Vladimir Likic — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 14:22:26 +0000

by Vladimir Likic

Ever wondered why programming in Bash is so difficult? Bash employs the same constructs as traditional programming languages; however, under the hood, the logic is rather different.

The Bourne-Again SHell (Bash) was developed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) under the GNU Project, which gives it a somewhat special reputation within the Open Source community. Today, Bash is the default user shell on most Linux installations. Although Bash is just one of several well known UNIX shells, its wide distribution with Linux makes it an important tool to know.

The main purpose of a UNIX shell is to allow users to interact effectively with the system through the command line. A common shell action is to invoke an executable, which in turn causes the kernel to create a new running process. Shells have mechanisms to send the output of one program as input into another and facilities to interact with the filesystem. For example, a user can traverse the filesystem or direct the output of a program to a file.

Although Bash is primarily a command interpreter, it's also a programming language. Bash supports variables, functions and has control flow constructs, such as conditional statements and loops. However, all of this comes with some unusual quirks. This is because Bash attempts to fulfill two roles at the same time: to be a command interpreter and a programming language—and there is tension between the two.

All UNIX shells, including Bash, are primarily command interpreters. This trait has a deep history, stretching all the way to the very first shell and the first UNIX system. Over time, UNIX shells acquired the programming capabilities by evolution, and this has led to some unusual solutions for the programming environment. As many people come to Bash already having some background in traditional programming languages, the unusual perspective that Bash takes with programming constructs is a source of much confusion, as evidenced by many questions posted on Bash forums.

In this article, I discuss how programming constructs in Bash differ from traditional programming languages. For a true understanding of Bash, it's useful to understand how UNIX shells evolved, so I first review the relevant history, and then introduce several Bash features. The majority of this article shows how the unusual aspects of Bash programming originate from the need to blend the command interpreter function seamlessly with the capabilities of a programming language.

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Book Review: Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

I don't know where to begin—and I mean that in a very positive way. I can best describe Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) as a "literary documentary". The book provides a sort of oral history of the Valley from the legends who built it.

The author, Adam Fisher, grew up in Silicon Valley. He continues to live in the Bay Area, so he's been exposed to many of the early technologies created in the region. He eventually became a computer programmer and writer, writing for Wired magazine and other publications. Valley of Genius is his first book, but he wrote very little of it—and he didn't need to do much more than piece together the many interviews he conducted to form a wonderful and continuous narrative that begins as early as the 1950s.

The story starts off with the very first computer that was more than just a super calculator created by Doug Engelbart. With a small team, he built a prototype: the oN-Line System, or NLS. It even was equipped with a "mouse"! The story continues on to the first video games manufactured by Nolan Bushnell and company in their pre-Atari days.

The book also details how, in parallel, Engelbart's prototype inspired the computers of the future developed at Xerox PARC, while the Spacewar video game would motivate a young Steve Wozniak not only to help Steve Jobs create video games for the later Atari, but also eventually to build the original Apple computer.

The narrative progresses with the birth of Apple, the company, was born and took the world of personal computing by storm—at least initially. What followed was an emotional roller coaster. The Apple II was a success, and up until Jobs looked to Alan Kay's visions preserved in the Xerox Alto, Apple continued to fail, but then later turned it all around with the Macintosh, as the story goes.

The book covers the evolving hardware (and software), and how the culture it nurtured evolved along with it. It explores how the early versions of the internet connected the youngest and brightest, and how ideas were shared—all of them centered around the concept of openness.

It looks at how passionate people started flame wars, and how publications, such as Wired, captured those times and emotions best. The book explores how Wired also rode the internet wave by shifting some of that focus toward its HotWired website. It considers the early days of the internet, at a time when it was all research and bulletin-board systems (or BBSes), and the problem of how to navigate this new World Wide Web. It describes how early web browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic killer or Mozilla), solved this need—and with it, helping to open the internet to more users.

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Heirloom Software: the Past as Adventure

Eric S. Raymond — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 12:17:29 +0000

by Eric S. Raymond

Through the years, I've spent what might seem to some people an inordinate amount of time cleaning up and preserving ancient software. My Retrocomputing Museum page archives any number of computer languages and games that might seem utterly obsolete.

I preserve this material because I think there are very good reasons to care about it. Sometimes these old designs reveal unexpected artistry, surprising approaches that can help us break free of assumptions and limits we didn't know we were carrying.

But just as important, cultures understand themselves through their history and their artifacts, and this is no less true of programming cultures than of any other kind. If you're a computer hacker, great works of heirloom software are your heritage as surely as Old Master paintings are a visual artist's; knowing about them enriches you and helps solidify your relationship to your craft.

For exactly re-creating historical computing experiences, not much can beat running the original binary executables on a software emulator for their host hardware. There are small but flourishing groups of re-creationists who do that sort of thing for dozens of different historical computers.

But that's not what I'm here to write about today, because I don't find that kind of museumization very interesting. It doesn't typically yield deep insight into the old code, nor into the thinking of its designers. For that—to have the experience parallel to appreciating an Old Master painting fully—you need not just a running program but source code you can read.

Therefore, I've always been more interested in forward-porting heirloom source code so it can be run and studied in modern environments. I don't necessarily even consider it vital to retain the original language of implementation; the important goals, in my view, are 1) to preserve the original design in a way that makes it possible to study that design as a work of craft and art, and 2) to replicate as nearly as possible the UI of the original so casual explorers not interested in dipping into source code can at least get a feel for the experiences had by its original users.

Now I'll get specific and talk about Colossal Cave Adventure.

This game, still known as ADVENT to many of its fans because it was written on an operating system that supported only monocase filenames at most six characters long, is one of the great early classics of software. Written in 1976–77, it was the very first text adventure game. It's also the direct ancestor of every rogue-like dungeon simulation, and through those the indirect ancestor of a pretty large percentage of the games being written even today.

If you're of a certain age, the following opening sequence will bring back some fond memories:

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