The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum

[Antonio Sun]

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Thomas Milne
<thomas.bruce.milne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 10:30 PM, James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org>
> wrote:
> > An interesting bit of history.
> >
> >
> http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-strange-birth-and-long-life-of-unix/1
>

It definitely brings back the warmth memories when I was learning the Unix
system in the University, and the legendary stories about its genius
authors.

- "The first edition of Unix let programmers call 34 different low-level
routines built into the operating system. It's a testament to the system's
enduring nature that nearly all of these system calls are still
available—and still heavily used—on modern Unix and Linux systems four
decades on. "
- The "first-­edition Unix provided a remarkably powerful environment for
software development. Yet it contained just 4200 lines of code at its heart
and occupied a measly 16 KB of main memory when it ran."

Anyone still remember what's the gross line count, including the comments?
I remember it was around 10,000, and I remember my prof quoting from the
author, something like, 10,000 lines of code, that's about the maximum one
can handle (memories each function and each line of code).

Was it, or was it about the *A Commentary on the Unix Operating
System*<http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/>book that we
learned, or neither?

That was a great story. I was really interested in the idea of running
> the original Unix. That would be very cool, to run Unix 1.0 in some
> kind of emulator on my linux machine. Would that be possible?
>

Yep, as in the article,

..." a copy of the first edition of
Unix<http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1>[is] running on
an emulated PDP-11/20."
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1

Thanks
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