“UNIX: A History and a Memoir” by Brian W. Kernighan

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Rating: 5/5 Stars

A nice, brief book from one of the people involved in the initial creation and subsequent development of Unix and the programming environment that grew up around it. A somewhat technical book, it covers the early history of the development of Unix itself and also the development and growth of the huge set of tools and programs that grew out of what Unix was able to provide as an operating system.

Chapter one looks at the history of the author’s education, as well as the history of Bell Labs before and after he joins it. It also introduces the large and varied cast of people he would work with while at the lab, many of whom will be familiar to those who have an interest in Computer Engineering. He also briefly covers the management style at Bell Labs, which helped to foster the attitude of having a long term view at the Labs; an attitude that probably helped to give rise to Unix.

Chapter two looks at how Unix came about. Multics was originally proposed as a system that could be used by a large group of people at the same time, to be developed by several companies. Unfortunately, it proved to be too ambitious, and Bell Labs decided to pull out of the project. This left the people working on Multics at Bell Labs looking for other things to do. Finding a little used computer, a DEC PDP-7, it was put to use to solve problems and, in the process, Unix was born when the programs were found to be generally useful. One of the main people who would create Unix in a matter of weeks was Ken Thompson, whose biography is provided in this chapter.

Chapter three looks at the first ‘official’ version of Unix. After the programs and operating system Ken Thompson created proved to be quite useful, an effort was made to convince upper management, who was not interested in creating an operating system after the failed Multics effort, to support Unix. In the end, the usefulness of Unix would win them over, and the group set up Unix on PDP-11 for the purpose of helping Bell Labs produce documents required for patent applications. The chapter also gives an entertaining look at the room used to store the Unix machine and some of the ‘fun’ they had. A biography of Dennis Ritchie is also provided.

Chapter four skips to the Sixth Edition of Unix produced, which was the first version introduced to the outside world. By then, Unix have proven to provide something unique and interesting to the subject of operating systems: it was portable (able to run on several kinds of processors), a generic file system (unique for its time), a set of language independent system calls, a shell for executing programs and a concept called ‘pipes’ that would lead to a unique and generic way to chain the input and output of programs. The C programming language would also play a major role in Unix. A biography of Doug McIlroy is provided at the end.

Chapter five looks at Seventh Edition Unix and the huge flowering of work that now grew out of what Unix enabled. This included the Bourne shell, Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler), the Make system (to manage and build programs from a set of separate files), Troff for typesetting, equation editors, Sed and Awk for text processing, UUCP for copying files from one Unix to another Unix system, and so on.

Chapter six covers other applications and work enabled by Unix. What came before was work done to enable researchers to do their work. Having proven its capability, Unix was now used in the commercial market. One of the first was by AT&T itself, using a Unix front-end machine to manage a disparate group of mainframe computers. Source code control systems was also another application that rose out of the commercial use of Unix. SCCS was the first, but it would enable others like RCS, CVS, Subversion and, currently, Git. The Unix source code was also being licensed to other corporations and universities and out of this would arise various Unix user groups who would band together to support each other and also books that would document and annotate the Unix source code.

Chapter seven is a brief chapter covering the various efforts to commercialize Unix in strange ways, especially over the trademark (TM) and wording of Unix by AT&T.

Chapter eight gives a brief look at the descendants of Unix, which have started to multiply. Systems from BSD to Linux and Plan 9 are covered, but it is not an exhaustive list.

Chapter nine looks at the legacy of Unix, from the various operating systems that arisen from it, to how Bell Labs is now a shadow of its former self, to the recognition the Unix system has given to its designers.

Book read from 2019/11/27 to 2019/12/03