The History of UNIX

Video presentation for my CIS course.

[mf]

My cousin 3 times removed was Alexander Graham Bell, so I can't help but only use Arch Linux today and have an utter fascination with everything UNIX.

[Tarodenaro]

Wait what? so the SUN from THAT Sun Microsystem used to be part of Standford University? now that's interesting, i had no idea.

[robertharker]

What a weird view of the history of UNIX. Focused on many things that are more niche and missing many major innovations that came from UNIX. Berkeley UNIX gave UNIX TCP/IP networking and virtual memory. SunOS gave us NFS and NIS, the Network File System and Network Information Service. NFS is still in widespread use. SUSE Linux was and still is a niche flavor of Linux. Cray's glory days are before their computers ran any flavor of UNIX. By the time Cray started building cluster based super computers, they were just one of many vendors doing the same think. Much of the cluster work originated with Project Beowulf.
You missed the original application of UNIX was as text formatting system for laying out Bell Labs Systems Journal articles. Remember "troff"?
The initial commercial success of UNIX was due the DARPA standardizing on VAX 780 computers running Berkeley UNIX with it's TCP/IP software for their US Defense Department research projects. DARPA was tired of buying different expensive proprietary Mainframe Computers for different research projects and then having to buy and additional proprietary Mainframe if they wanted to share research tools with another project at a different location.

[JKVisFX]

Thank you for mentioning Mac OS X which, as you mentioned, is indeed a flavor of UNIX at its core. That is probably the core reason MAC OS X is so much more robust and secure than Windows can ever be. And, having that command line terminal that gets you right into UNIX on the Mac is a true gift for the very few who explore it.

[TheCocoaDaddy]

Fun video! Thanks for posting! In college, I used SunOS. Once I started working professional, I got to use HP-UX, Solaris (on SPARC), AIX and z/OS. We had access to "OpenEdition" but I never used it. :)

[KarimAktouf]

Wow, all my professional infancy and teenage years in 10 minutes ! And I learned so much, great job @Eric !

[mercster]

UNIX/Linux has been a significant part of my life. Started out with a SunOS shell account in the early 90s, quickly installed Linux... parlayed that experience into a career as a UNIX admin, doing work with many flavors... AIX, HP-UX, DEC, IRIX. Thanks.

[alankwellsmsmba]

I logged on to my first Unix shell in 1986, an NCR tower to which 32 terminals had been attached running System V. Coming from an IBM system 36/38 background (and Microsoft of course) I saw what could be. It was a great career, after NCR, I ran a national network of 400 terminals in 30 cities running Burroughs BTOS systems hosting a Unix guest, my first VM experience. I learned to repair file systems using fsdb, which no one else could do. From there to a SCO Open Desktop network running TVP/IP, replacing a mainframe app. After grad school to a Sun shop right at the beginning of the commercialism of the nascent Internet. I never really saw the winners in the game being a broke father of four just trying to put dinner on the table but Unix has been very very good to me, easy engaging work for exceptionally good money. Today I have some Macs and Linux boxes, and one (Gag) Windows box for a game I never play. It’s an impossible operating environment.

[daverei]

You forgot Digital Equipment Corporation, at it’s day it was the second largest computer company after IBM. DEC had their BSD system 4.2 allied Ultrix that ran on the VAX platform and MIPS R3000 series, later they produced a system V release called OSF1 for their Alpha chip.

[tfox]

While at at&t, I used unix system 5 which was on their 3b2, pdp11/70 systems. I really liked the command line interface as compared to gui's. Interesting video. I study unix even now that I'm retired. Thank you for this video.

[holyngrace]

Excellent. TY!
I've been with UNIX since the days of PDP11-5. Visited languages and hardware of many types as a result.
Long Live UNIX! 👍

[JoeyGarcia]

The BSD variants are my favorite Unix descendant notably FreeBSD and OpenBSD. You did mention NetBSD, but you forgot to mention DragonflyBSD which is a fork of FreeBSD. It's a smaller project, but extremely capable and has it's own filesystem called the Hammer filesystem.

[bruceivy]

Well done! I loved that little gotcha at the end that shows to the world that Apple runs on Unix.

[montecorbit]

At 8:05
"Only AIX is being developed today...."

I am unsure about HP-UX, but I know for a fact that Solaris is still being

[Damarious]

Beautiful video. Touches on so much great information that can branch off and be independently researched.

[mariobrito]

kudos for the ascii Voyager on the belanna box :)

[cstuff]

HP, SUN and SGI all started out on Motorola 68x00 CPUs with their Unix flavors. HP-PA, SPARC and MIPS only came later.

[mikelieman]

Where did that "mad men" style commercial illustration come from? It was awesome.

[oscargrainger]

So what did Linus Torvalds do with it. ?

[athemalive]

So not only AIX is still developed today. but all BSDs including MacOS.