Unix Timeline
Introduction
Dennis Ritchie, the man who invented C, co-created Unix, and is largely regarded as effectively influencing every software system we use on a daily basis. His death was largely ignored, overshadowed by Steve Jobs' death, one week before.
Dennis' timeline
- 1941: He was born in Bronxwille, New York on 9th September.
- He graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics.
- 1970: He developed UNIX at Bell Labs.
- 1972: Along with Ken Thompson, he started with developing C programming language to port UNIX from PDP-7 to PDP-11. They wrote book C programming language (also known as 'K&R').
- 1983: Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system.
- 1990: Ritchie and Thompson received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), for the origination of the UNIX operating system and the C programming language.
- 1999: Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the National Medal of Technology of 1998 from President Bill Clinton for co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the C programming language which, according to the citation for the medal, "led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software, and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age".
- 1999: Dennis Ritchie clarifies that he sees Linux and BSD operating systems as a continuation of the basis of the Unix operating system, and as derivatives of Unix.
- 2005: Industrial Research Institute awarded Ritchie with its Achievement Award in recognition of his contribution to science and technology, and to society generally, with his development of the Unix operating system.
- 2011: Ritchie, along with Thompson, was awarded the Japan Prize for Information and Communications for his work in the development of the Unix operating system.
- 2011: Ritchie was found dead on October 12th at the age of 70 in his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, where he lived alone.
Quotes
Ritchie was under the radar. His name was not a household name at all, but… if you had a microscope and could look in a computer, you'd see his work everywhere inside.
I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as the more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers.
The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today.
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX.
Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.
C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
… with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.
I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.
I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.
For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.
C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.
I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.
At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler
It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.
Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.
A program designed for inputs from people is usually stressed beyond breaking point by computer-generated inputs.
UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.
I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate
When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.
I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.
Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.
The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.
C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.
For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.
I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time. I'm a home-body and get fatigued by it fairly soon, but enjoy thinking back on experiences when I've returned and then often wish I'd arranged a longer stay in the somewhat exotic place.
It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.
Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.
My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.
From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.
The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.
I listen to mostly-classical music, but mostly by radio - I'm not an audiophile.
Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.
I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.
The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software.
Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9
C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new
Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at The Labs.
A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.
A Brief History of Unix Time
Fun facts about Unix
- Origins: Unix was first developed in the 1960s and 1970s by AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. It was originally meant to be a convenient platform for programmers to write software, rather than for non-programmer users.
- Written in C: Unix was one of the first operating systems to be written in the C programming language. This was revolutionary because it allowed Unix to be ported to different computer hardware platforms more easily than if it had been written in assembly language.
- The Name: The name "Unix" is a pun on an earlier operating system called "Multics". When Bell Labs pulled out of the Multics project, which was a complex system intended for general users, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created a simpler system. They initially called it "Unics" (Uniplexed Information and Computing Service), which was a play on "Multics", and it eventually evolved into "Unix".
- License and Spread: Unix's source code was initially distributed for free in academic settings, which led to widespread adoption and variation in universities. This, in turn, led to the creation of a whole ecosystem of Unix-like operating systems, including those that follow the Linux and BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) traditions.
- Influence on Other Systems: Many of the concepts and programming tools from Unix have become standards in computer science. For example, Unix introduced the hierarchical file system structure, the concept of process and file permissions, and many of the small, powerful command-line utilities that are still used today.
- The Creation of C: The development of Unix was closely tied to the creation of the C programming language. Unix was the first operating system to be almost entirely written in C by 1973, which greatly influenced the spread and standardization of C.
- Philosophy: Unix is famous for its philosophy of "small, simple, and modular". This means that the system should have small tools that each do one thing well, and that work together over a universal interface (like text streams).
- The First Virus: The first computer virus in the wild, called "The Morris Worm", was created by a student at Cornell University in 1988 and targeted Unix systems. It exploited known vulnerabilities in Unix network services.
- Symbolic Influence: The Unix time (also known as Epoch time), which counts time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, is used in various programming environments. This has become a standard method for representing time in computers.
- Legal Battles: Unix has been at the center of various legal battles and ownership disputes over the years, notably between AT&T and BSD and between SCO Group and IBM. These disputes often centered around the rights to the Unix source code and its derivatives.
Unix's influence on the development of subsequent operating systems and its role in the history of computing is profound and enduring.
Birth Date to Unix Timestamp Converter
Unix Time
Dennis Ritchie's dissertation
Read the lost thesis of Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language & co-creator of Unix: Ritchie dissertation
Ritchie never got his PhD b/c he didn't want to pay Harvard the thesis binding fee.
(v/ @IEEESpectrum)