The History of UNIX

Hi...I would like to know...what do you think about Slackware 14.0? Thanks.

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.

This is the weirdest "History of Unix" video I've ever seen. I just don't know what to think of this. 😕

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

Well I am lacking now a Unix book that I bought, who stole that one ? Well eh ? Saskia F.J.H. van Houtert engineer/office-manager.

Impressive bottled documentary!

So cool, thanks for the much needed history lesson!

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

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

Short and sweet. Thank you!

I've always been in love with risc procs. also i was 90s gamer they were in at the time. i had a fascination with old powerpc archs cuz they risc.
but alas i grew up in an x86 Windows/Dos world. it was the only affordable option as a kid.

then i was introduced to Linux running on x86 and took a fascination with that.

seeing these platforms disappear for a while was sad.
home computers stopped using risc chips, and ms dominated the market.

then one day i heard about osx and it was running on risc chips. i was tickled pink to see Unix finally become a consumer OS. i think every one was, even the Linux geeks-even if they denied it. 8D
then apple introduced ios with iPhones and i had instant future shock.
a unix kernel running in the palm of my hand on risc archs.

i still get a novelty out of using mobile devices like old iphones(jobs era), android devices.
risc, linux, unix has finally dominated a corner of the computer market.
and that's just cool to me.

good

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.

kudos for the ascii Voyager on the belanna box :)

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.

Good video and good memories. I love Plan 9 because UNIX (not kidding) ;-)
I found Solaris the most better "modern" UNIX in the early 2000s but I really think the true spirit of UNIX is now in the *BSD flavours (aka OpenBSD or FreeBSD). Even Microsoft was in the UNIX market with Xenix, at the time. We're missing the point with "modern" UNIX clone (aka Linux, which is not UNIX) in the current times.

So what did Linus Torvalds do with it. ?

Sebenarnya biasa saja..
Tak perlu exaggerating..

why do you use distortion effects in your video? to disturb and distract watchers?

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! 👍

❤

The issue is not an black actress as Cleopatra, but saying that Egypt was a southwest African civilization.

The only thing that I know that Unix and Linux are operatingssystems and that I worked with those.

I can't stand the typing sounds while speaking. Not going to watch all of it.

@Eric Howton I very much enjoyed the content of this video, as I love computing history. Well done. I would submit, though, that the "shaking" of the text and background was extremely distracting. At one point, I had considered not finishing the remaining portion of the video, but I finished watching it, though with my laptop's lid nearly closed. Please continue making excellent content for your channel, though if you were to look into alternative/less distracting video effects, that would make me eternally grateful. Many thanks, Paul Williams.

The AI images are an interesting idea but a bit unsettling.

Great video!
I really like your cool retro term config, any chance you can tell me what background and foreground colors are? There is also an option to export the profile as JSON so you could upload that to pastebin or something like that too

Cool treatment ! Thank you.
Tho u did leav out da Phreaking part.
;)

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

These guys have privileged minds, to create a such an operational environment that changed they way we see the world nowadays.

Cool

This is one hell of a resume

This seems an odd view of the history of Unix. Most of the the early proprietary versions of Unix — the ones installed on expensive workstations designed for high-end users — faded away long ago. What's interesting about Unix is how it morphed into Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and Android — thereby becoming a core part of devices used by billions of people. One of the interesting chapters in that history, not mentioned in the video, is role of Steve Jobs and NeXT Inc. in pushing Unix-based computing forward. Another is the role of DEC minicomputers in early development of Unix. (I began using Unix at UC Berkeley in 1980. I began using a Mac computer in 1984. One of my colleagues got one of the early NeXT cubes. Other colleagues used Unix workstations from Sun, etc. I was surrounded by Unix throughout the 1980s and continuously thereafter. In 2023 all of my computing devices have still Unix under the hood.)

The MIPS processor was developed by MIPS Computer Systems, not SGI.
MIPS processors were used by several companies, including SGI and DEC.

You show a picture of an IBM zEnterprise 114. AIX didn't run on that box but there were plenty of SuSE and REd Hat images running on z/VM on those machines. I looked after Linux on zSeries machines for years.

Excellent video! Thanks.

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.

That Swedish speaking Finnish guy is somehow missing in this.

Those AI generated photos are trippy.

I've been playing with Chimera Linux recently. Cool project. I hope it gets the same love from the community as it does from the creator.

1809?

ummmm... You include a few things that are debatable, and you leave a few out.
As one example ~ you mention at the end that one of these UNIXs is still maintained and it is POSIX compliant. This is true, but RHEL is also POSIX complaint and almost any other Linux system that wanted to go through and make the necessary adjustments, could also be POSIX compliant. It's not really all that hard, it's just tedious and exacting.
POSIX is a very detailed standard, very rigorous, but what it really asks, is "Am I UNIX?" Peers in the US military network, must be POSIX compliant. Windows cannot be made POSIX compliant ~ not even close. But Linux can be, and RHEL for one, is POSIX compliant. That's why IBM paid US $37 billion some years back to own RedHat.
Another detail, I saw an interview done in the late '90s, of Richie, Kernigan and Thomson, and the interviewer asked the 3 what they though of Linux. He was obviously surprised when all three laughed and said it was the best UNIX yet. That was clearly not what he was angling for. The men who invented UNIX are (were) all rather big fans of Linus Torvalds. As far as they were concerned, Linux was just another flavour of UNIX ~ this one written (slightly revised) to evade copyright laws.

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

thats why I have stuck to MacOS for the last 15 years or so. Unix that I learned in college mostly works. In the few places it doesn't like networking it's because Apple did something specific, or because the shell I learned in college was different than Bash.
Which is funny because now MacOS is ZSH.

AT&T Unix... the ripoff OS.

You forgot FreeNAS/TrueNAS , probably the second most popular consumer Unix

Nice video. I don't know why you kept showing DOS commands in graphics overlays. DOS is not at all Unix. Also, I don't know why you showed a terminal program and window decorations which looked like they came from MacOS. MacOS is based on Unix, but is not Unix. You could have shown the Unix "ls" and "uname" command listings instead of the DOS commands, and a KDE or Gnome terminal instead of a MacOS one, for example. Also, although AIX is IBM's version of Unix, it typically does not run on the System z computer you showed. Instead AIX runs on IBM System p.