UNIX Is, Likely, the Oldest

UNIX is, likely, the oldest operating system still in widespread use today, and still containing bits of code and philosophy generated sometime in the 1970s by predecessors of the Free Software Movement. Those philosophies -- authored by a small group of computer scientists at Bell Labs -- spread throughout the programming industry and revolutionized the nature of both high-level languages, and operating systems themselves. That UNIX aimed to be universal -- in both compatibility and availability -- led to its adoption by many academic and research organizations, as well, eventually, as corporate users. Availability, though, led to a multi-headed development effort, culminating in the Unix Wars of the mid to late 80s, from whose ashes emerged the fewer, stronger brandings of Unix available today.

It all began with a video game. In 1969, Ken Thompson -- a programmer at Bell Labs -- still aggravated by the failure of Multics -- a recent project of his with aims similar to Unix -- commandeered a now famous PDP-7 console in a corner at Bell Labs to code a game he had been working on: Space Travel. The game was clumsy, written in an assembly language, and "cost about $75 in system time on the big GE 635, a cost that hardly endeared it to management."

. More than anything the game served as a proof of concept for programming the PDP-7 from which flowed the idea of implementing an actual operating system.

The first of many paradigms which Unix revolutionized was that an operating system had to be written in an assembly language. In 1971, Thompson attempted to write Unix in a higher-level language, starting with Fortran but, soon abandoning that effort, began anew with a language he developed for the occasion, B. From improvements made to B. evolved C, still in use today in its newest incarnations, and a predecessor of Java. The C. programming language, whose destiny has been intertwined with Unix's, is another major development issued from the birth of Unix.

Coded in C, Unix was the first truly portable operating system, able to migrate between computers and share communications between those computers. This proved a defining moment in the history of operating systems and programming in general. Previously, when purchasing new consoles, a customer was obliged to develop and implement a whole new operating system, specific to the new console, including manually transferring data from the old console to the new. Inter-compatibility led to a boom in computer applications. In the mid-70s many academic and research institutions began implementing Unix on their consoles to standardize data storage and manipulation.

Another important philosophy first implemented in the Unix code was that of pipelines, or "toolbox" software. Rather than build monolithic blocks of "black-box" software, the developers used smaller, modular pieces of software -- each performing a single, dedicated task -- and ran data-streams through these modular "tools" to accomplish series of operations. By interchanging, mixing, and matching the tools a wide array of operations was possible. Doug McIlroy, one of the original developers is quoted:

the philosophy that everyone started to put forth was 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.'

This philosophy evolved to fully permeate every part of the programming industry. Furthermore, the philosophy of using text streams further improved Unix's universality.

In the mid-70s the cat got out of the bag. Unix spread through the academic world like wildfire and soon into the corporate world. Because of a pre-existing anti-trust suit, AT&T -- the parent company of Bell Labs -- was prevented from marketing Unix as a product, this led to its rise as a free, or open-source software. The upshot was not only the widespread dissemination of Unix, but also the development of tools and code for it in a competitive environment, leading to exponential improvements in short periods of time.

The problem came in the mid-80s, when the multiplicity of Unices fostered a well-meaning, if misguided, standardization attempt. AT&T, in partnership with Sun Microsystems, initiated the endeavor but their competitors -- who produced their own operating systems based on Unix -- became concerned and formed the Open Systems Foundation (OSF) to preserve their own market share. In a reaction to this reactionism, AT&T and Sun Microsystems formed Unix International to fight for their market share, and then it was on: the Unix Wars had begun.

From the Unix Wars emerged two distinct Unices, each standardized by one of the rival consortiums, but both stronger than the multiplicity of software available before hand. In 1993 AT&T -- freed from anti-trust laws by a mid-80s suit -- finalized its sale of Unix to Novell, which later sold the rights to the Santa Cruz Operation.