The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum

[Thomas Milne]

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 10:07 PM, Antonio Sun <antoniosun-N9AOi2cAC9ZBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Thomas Milne <thomas.bruce.milne-Re5JQEeQqe8 at public.gmane.orgm>
> 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 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 [is] running on an emulated
> PDP-11/20."
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1

I guess I assumed someone would be thoughtful enough to figure out I
was asking 'how', and maybe even 'what'. Sorry about that.

> Thanks
>
>



-- 
Thomas Milne
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