A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

Notes:
- Per in the last video, I want to thank viewer Lance for pointing out that NeXTSTEP derives from Mach, the CMU variant of BSD.
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[@ManMountainMetals]

I lost 2 cousins in the Unix Wars. Their platoon was overrun on Galgam 5 by the Thrax advance. Grim days.😢

[@dial2616]

it was too easy to get devoured by Zork back then....

[@xila464]

I lost mine through Windows. All that remained on the pavement was a GUI mess. But then, as they always said, What You See Is What You Get.

[@JohnnyWednesday]

I fought in the later home micro wars - your squad just didn't survive unless it was led by a Unix veteran

[@UnconsciousCompetence]

I tried to snort some Amtraks, but the trains wouldn't fit up my nose.

[@kayakMike1000]

I am glad I didn't renew my enlistment back on the Galgam 5 militia. The Thrax were ruthless enemies and nearly destroyed the entire militias. My friend was a warrant officer on sick leave that got promoted all the way to Brigadeer General because so many were wiped out during the Thrax Advance.

[@lance31415]

As a foot soldier in the Unix Wars I approve this message. So many generals, so little clue.

[@tcbobb1613]

I hope that you got into a lot of fights on forms over this!

[@huveja9799]

As a mercenary in that war, I gave a fuck for those generals ..

[@ozansh_]

As a Linux user, this feels like listening to grandpa telling his Korea memories

[@PuzzledMonkey]

I first installed Linux in November of '92, using 30 micro disks of the SLS distribution. It took me a full month to get everything working. The following April, I attended the first Seattle Linux Users Group meeting, at which Phil Hughes, the meeting's organizer, sounded us out for interest in his proposed Linux Journal.

[@mendodsoregonbackroads6632]

Let me tell you how we used to do our computing on Base 5 bean sticks. Two sticks with 5 beans, each added up to ten, and ten of those made 50. Two of the 50’s were 100. The results were recorded on slips of paper with a carbon etching mechanism and stored there for later reference. True story BTW.

[@james6401]

I got Red Hat running on a Dell desktop in 1998 from a CD I got from a magazine. I had to try it out because Windows 98 kept interrupting my DVD experience. Not sure if Red Hat was able to operate the DVD player in the end.... Been partitioning and running Linux ever since

[@rnish2958]

That is old. Today grandpa tells Viet Nam war stories.

[@James_Knott]

Sometime in the 90s, I first installed Slackware from floppies. At that time I had no idea what I was doing, so I didn't know what packages to install. On the other hand, I was later working at IBM Canada, as an OS/2 product specialist, and saw someone in the office running Linux. IBM was encouraging us to work with Linux on company time and I'd frequently find packs of Linux distros in my mail slot. I liked Mandrake but I recall I had to change one file, to get it to work with token ring. There was also one day when I went with some of my co-workers to a Corel Linux presentation.

[@iankester-haney3315]

I just can't feel bad for AT&T here. Their inability to see the value of UNIX cost them dearly. The lucked into the OS and then went and tried to extract massive profits from it. Microsoft realized the market could be huge if only the price were right. AT&T just constantly tried to milk the golden calf lead to all their Anti-Trust issues.

[@fredinit]

Add Xerox PARC to the list of stupid execs around this timeframe.

[@acmefixer1]

AT&T was a technologically conservative company that couldn't progress with the new advances in technology. Finally the dam broke with Linux.

[@grizwoldphantasia5005]

AT&T had a sordid history from the very beginning. They made so many enemies in the early 1900s and lost so many lawsuits that they begged the government to make them a monopoly. When that got in their way in the 1950s, they begged the government to amend the monopoly in exchange for giving up the computer market. When they wanted back into the computer market, they begged the government to break them up in exchange. On a personal basis, every single phone line I ever had from AT&T and its post-breakup PacBell was a disaster. Six months of fighting doubled phone bills, a year or two of literally crossed wires in their central office, bogus disconnection which took a month to straighten out. Once cell phones came in I could finally get rid of them, and I'd choose the excreable Verizon over AT&T simply because of AT&T's miserable history. T-Mobile has their own problems, but those two chumps make them look like Prince Charming in comparison.

[@raffriff42]

My high school chum who went on to work at Bell Labs as a metallurgist gave me the impression that AT&T’s mental energy was largely consumed with managing the reliability of its vast hardware infrastructure. They owned everything, from the switching stations down to the phone in your bedroom, and if they could get a part to be 1% more reliable, it would be a huge win for some department chief. So I can see how they might not appreciate the benefits of an ^open source^, ^personal computer^ operating system.

[@craigslist6988]

little did they know they would lay the groundwork for a future flood of MBA dbag m-rons to run every new tech into the ground repeatedly by trying to extract more money from the same product every quarter instead of selling the product at a price point that makes sense for everyone and developing it to increase value. The true standard bearer for the boomer generation's business management style.

[@windunursetyadi]

As a Linux daily driver, I'm glad you made this video about Unix wars where everyone at the end decides to use Linux since it was POSIX compliant without any of the headaches. Unix still alive today though trough the BSD variants and the Apple's OS family.

[@sillysad3198]

i remember some users preferred to write scripts fo "ksh" on solaris and from time to time they clashed with "csh" users...

[@cpt_bill366]

I got so fed up with Win10 and 3rd party IT that I brought in my own laptop with LMDE & NsCDE as my daily driver. I'm grateful for the efforts that produced the CDE. It is a wonderfully consistent experience without ads. Does that make me a UNIX user? I think so, but I can't find a single person who cares. I suppose I'm a power user. I love Linux, but I'm not a programmer at all. I have been using various distros for 20 years.

[@sillysad3198]

@@cpt_bill366 when they force me use a win machine i run putty from my flash and open vim on my server to do the job.

[@rokker333]

What about Mainframes? Do such things still exist and what are they running on?

[@tcbobb1613]

​@@rokker333Banks still run them. I do not know what they run on.

[@n00bnetrum]

Man as someone who followed "that" lawsuit I can never help myself but chuckle when SCO is mentioned anywhere.

[@Infrared73]

I'm hoping that the series continues and he covers it. I definitely remember the mess that it was and hearing a rehash would be really interesting.

[@earthwormscrawl]

I got my BSEE in 1982 and my first exposure to Unix was "Zeus", the Zilog Unix running on the Z8000. I dropped our of the Unix world (working with DOS, Windows, CPM, etc.) until 2001 when I was thrown back into it. The arrogance and intentional unhelpfulness of Linux "Experts" at that point was a shock. I've completely remastered the subject, but I hate working with arrogant Linux developers.

[@Aarkwrite]

Oooh blast from the past

[@TheGreatAtario]

You insensitive clod!(tm)

[@mubashir3]

I followed "that" lawsuit on Groklaw and elsewhere, very closely. I became so confident about SCO being wrong that I eventually ended up shorting the SCO stock. A massive bet that paid off.

[@TheUglyGnome]

Oh ... those days! Hated Unix, because it was different in every system (DEC, Sun, HP, etc). And then there was Linus. The Nerdy guy who came to the students' club room to buy his bottle of Coke few times a day. We others just wasted our time having fun, while he made history.

[@georgerogers1166]

Gnu is important on the userland front.

[@mmmmmwha]

It wasn’t that bad. I worked at AT&T, we ran Sun’s workstations, but built our product on system V. While it sucked not to have some of the features either platform, a few good shell scripts/aliases made them pretty much the same command line. Sure there were some things you had to remember to do differently, but it was just the way it was back then because we had already come through cpm, and various proprietary OSs. This was practically unity. The Unix wars were really over way before Linux ever was really a thing at any scale. WinNT kind of ate the small scale sever installs from Unix (I know I was in business deploying both at the time), TCP/IP on windows 3.11 (Wolverine) was the nail in the coffin for the low end knowledge worker workstation. All that said, I loved/love, and still use Unix (in its many variants) today. It was where I learned everything about OS architecture. Once I took a system V class while at AT&T. In the class I had access to the source (when that was a big deal on the AT&T side, back in the pre-release Sys V days). I wrote a little bit shifting encryption program on the fly and packed up the entire OS and sent it to myself, once I realized that the class room systems still had a UUCP connection that was used to set up the workstations. It was the best learning tool. Ah, the good old days. 😉

[@rokker333]

Sure, bro.

[@JohnSmith-sk7cg]

​@@georgerogers1166 I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as GNU, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. GNU is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Linux system made useful by the scheduler and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

[@o_junio]

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!

[@RalfStephan]

Fun fact, soon after Linus announced the 1st public Linux kernel, it appeared as a bootable package on mailboxes (amateur servers accessible over the telephone network) here in Germany. Compressed, with about 1MB size it fit on a floppy disk for booting a PC. It contained GNU tools like gcc v1.x and an editor, so that was the start for all the GNU software development that followed. I was there, though not prominently.

[@aaronrey2658]

I remember the first boot edition we were attaching it to any PC we could swipe clean that was fun...

[@privateagent]

I was a little bit more late than that, when I ordered my first Linux CD, Slackware something.. from Germany :)

[@andrerenault]

In Cliff Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, one of the clues earlier on is that the hacker is using AT&T Unix commands and not Berkeley Unix commands, leading the investigation team to believe that the hacker wasn’t local.

[@MrWaalkman]

What a fantastic book and guy. :)

[@jusbo18]

That book is only one of the 5 books I've read front to back twice in my life. Love that book!

[@James_Knott]

I read that book and was a computer tech back then. I used to work on VAX 11/780s and Data General Eclipse computers, among others. When my wife read the book, she could relate some of what she read to things I had shown her in my office.

[@James_Knott]

@@jusbo18 My wife liked the recipes. 🙂

[@esra_erimez]

My father came of age during the Unix wars. He ran Bill Jolitz's (RIP) 386BSD on a 386 PC he put together. Today we run various flavors of Ubuntu in the house. AT&T really dropped the ball on this one.

[@gus473]

Here are a couple more: the "AT&T Universal Card" (your landline phone long distance combined with a Visa credit card account), and the acquisition of Time Warner/HBO (and the relatively recent disposition of same). Oh, and is their cellphone carrier business still ahead of Verizon, one of the AT&T-breakup "Baby Bell" companies? AT&T has dropped the ball plenty of times in plenty of ways. Somehow, they're still around.... ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[@gearboxworks]

@@gus473- Actually, the AT&T of today is not really the AT&T that made these mistakes with Unix. Southwestern Bell, itself spun out of AT&T during divestiture, acquired the failing AT&T in 2005 and decided to rename itself AT&T, dropping the Southwestern Bell name. Had it not been acquired and the acquiring company had not taken on the name of those they acquired, it is likely there there would not be an AT&T existing today. 🤷‍♂️

[@mubashir3]

@@gearboxworks "Actually, the AT&T of today I not really the AT&T that made these mistakes with Unix" This! The AT&T that created Unix is long dead. Much like Polaroid, the camera company. Names live on, the businesses are gone.

[@timothygibney159]

I still use FreeBSD which is it's clone as a router in hyper-V for my virtual networks 😅. PFsense is a scripted appliance which is simply to setup in a virtual environment or a real one

[@floydjohnson7888]

​@mubashir3 You've reminded me that Bellcore is no more. In 1991, though, they were roughly one mile due north of my old university's Unix labs.

[@bob_mosavo]

When I came of age, it was towards the end of the Unix wars. I used SunOS, HP-UX, Solaris, NeXT STEP, and IRIX at work. For my small business, I used BSDi (386BSD), waiting for Linux to come out and become stable. Thanks for the trip down memory lane 👍

[@robertlawson4295]

Like all wars, it was driven by greed and selfishness. "That's MINE, get away!" says the man, clutching the disc to his chest with a menacing, hateful glare, teeth bared. But with the passing of time, the IP slipped through his fingers and he ended up with nothing.

[@RictorScale]

Wow that's poetic

[@ebx100]

This was a trip down memory lane for me. So many brilliant minds running emerging companies. Tech just isn't the same these days.

[@craigslist6988]

tech today is like if every boomer looked at all those companies innovating and thought "I like what ATT did here... how can we run our own tech companies into the ground and hold back society with astounding greed and stupidity?" Nothing but braindead MBAs running companies in the US since the seventies..

[@chucklynch5505]

I worked at Bell Labs during this time. It was pretty chaotic. That was a great job! It may have been the peak for the greatest industrial R&D operation in history

[@24hhhhours]

Can you please tell us more

[@sixstringedthing]

Some viewers, like myself, may have a deep interest in the history of computer/data science but arrived on the scene about a decade too late to serve in the Unix Wars and were really only employed to tend the wounded and clean up the mess. To those people I say: If you've never read *The Unix-Hater's Handbook* edited by Garfinkel/Weise/Strassman, you owe it to yoursef to rectify this situation as soon as possible. Regardless of one's opinion about the OS itself, the editors who compiled the book, or the denizens of usenet who contrbuted their accounts of many vicious battles, it remains a fascinating and -sometimes- often hilarious look into the attitudes and thought processes of those who developed and used the multiple flavours of Unix in its heyday (often against their will). Highly recommended reading.

[@brodriguez11000]

Even came with a barf bag.

[@strayling1]

@@brodriguez11000 I still have mine, stuck inside the cover and still unfilled.

[@sixstringedthing]

@@strayling1 A wonderful book. Chock full of Old Greybeard Knowledge as long as you're able to clamp down on the gag reflex and just keep reading. Cheers ;)

[@BobHank2]

Wow, brilliant as usual. You absorb confusing data like a sump pump and deliver it clean and easily understood. Much thanks Leonardo.

[@subliminalvibes]

You watched a 22 minute video in just fifteen minutes?

[@BobHank2]

Did my appreciation for his creation offend you, or are you OCD about everything?

[@subliminalvibes]

@@BobHank2 I'm not offended. I'm _amazed!_

[@ebx100]

Sump pump???😂😂😂

[@raffriff42]

Who is Leonardo?

[@MonochromeWench]

Berkeley Sockets from BSD are likely going to be around forever and will ultimately be the most important contribution of UNIX to computing as a whole. Every Operating system needs to have them as they are the standard for writing internet applications.

[@markvalery8632]

It has been too many decades. But I thought a competing interface from System V unix was being used more than BSD sockets (this was the 90s). I can't even remember the name of the Sys V equivalent.

[@TheEvertw]

The UNIX wars show like little else how bean counters destroyed a business by misreading the room, overpricing a product because they thought they could, and creating a competitor who wiped them out. All to the great detriment of the consumer.

[@James_Knott]

Yep, capitalism at it's finest! 🙂

[@stucky101]

My grandpappy fought in the UNIX wars. Spent 4 years as an ATT POW. He was never the same man afterwards.

[@donjonmaister]

I never knew that the history of UNIX was such a shitstorm of a mess. I feel like I'll have to watch this video multiple times and take notes to comprehend all this madness. Excellent video, by the way.

[@grizwoldphantasia5005]

See if you can find Groklaw archives for what may come in a later installment, I hope, covering the utterly bizarre SCO v2 lawsuits. Just pick a few random articles. The SCO saga makes the main UNIX wars look sane by comparison.

[@tcbobb1613]

​​@@grizwoldphantasia5005holy shit. I read on Wikipedia the SCO lawsuit it's was wild has hell. IBM probably spent way more money on the lawsuit than 14.5 million dollars. I have an question why couldn't IBM just pay What is left of SCO 25 million dollars just to get rid of the lawsuit?

[@JonathanMaddox]

@@tcbobb1613 because you don't hand over money to obvious fraudsters, it will encourage more of the same.

[@DavidChipman]

@@tcbobb1613 have you ever heard the phrase about "paying the Danegeld"? If you pay once, you'll keep on paying

[@kayakMike1000]

Bell Labs was a national treasure. So many nobel prizes and great discoveries...

[@1pcfred]

Yeah and the guy that walked backwards and the other one that made paper airplanes all day. Good times.

[@shitcoinsrus]

developers developers developers

[@covert0overt_810]

(does coke dance clap)

[@Spacedog79]

Ballmer knew how to work a crowd

[@jonytube]

2 months ago? What?

[@covert0overt_810]

@@Spacedog79 yes.. with gloria estefan

[@benwlee]

Remember those 30+ 1.4m high density disk for the early Linux distribution? True excitement and selfless sharing all around.

[@mubashir3]

Yes. You could get hand cramps installing Linux on a computer back then.

[@1pcfred]

While you could go that route I never did. Early on I opted for CD installs. Then I only needed 2 or 6 floppies depending on the distro. I would buy sets of CDs at computer shows. I was only on a dial up and just felt I didn't have the bandwidth to download everything. Later I proved myself wrong by downloading Slackware 7 over dial up. It only took me three days. It was 128 MB. I did a hard disk install of it. How times have changed.

[@MartinHouston42]

I ran the UKUUG Linux SiG back in the early 90s. The main achievement was sweet talking a number of different UK computer magazines to hand over the use of their cover CDs to get Linux into the public's hands RedHat 4.1 SuSe Linux, Slackware, and even a now defunct distro called LinuxFT. That used a union file-system so it could start running right away from the CD. Software got copied to the hard disk only as it got used. A great boon in days of really small hard disks! @@1pcfred

[@fredinit]

Jon - this one brings back some great memories. I have roughly half a dozen monochrome AT&T UNIX PCs in dry storage displayed @00:26. Most include 10Base2 cards with AUX & Coax ports, and memory expansion boards. Kit includes all the manuals, SVR4 5.25" floppy disks, additional software, spare 20 & 30 meg hard drives, power supplies, etc. Picked them, laterally, out of a dumpster (with permission) when the university I was at was clearing out one of the labs. Plan on either getting them back up and running or donating them to a good home (e.g. Computer History Museum). I only have half a dozen because that's all I could fit in my car at the time. Little bit of info.. the UNIX PCs used off-the shelf hard drives with ST-506 interfaces (dual ribbon cables - one to control the drive, one for data), floppy drives, etc. and Motorola 68010 CPUs. I pulled the 68010 from a parted out UNIX PC and put it in my stock Amiga 2000 for about a 10% performance boost.

[@joekrepps]

You’re a brother from another mother. 😊 I bought a 3B1/Unix PC just after they were discontinued. Great fun and a nice step up from the OS/9 running on my Radio Shack Color Computer. After many years, I bought the AT&T 7300(?) from a friend which I have in storage. I think I still have the set of manuals with floppies in the red 3-ring binders.

[@fredinit]

@@joekreppsOh, Jez.. we had a 3B20S in the lab running UNIX - big honking machine w/ 9-track r2r in the front. My boxes are a mix of 7300's and 3B1's. Really not much difference between the two. While we're yapping on AT&T - spent a lot of time over the summers refurbishing AT&T 6300's (Olivetti M24) - a DOS based PC that were in the dorm rooms. One of the worst PC clones I ever touched. Only Tandy, with it's wonky almost incompatible BIOS, had a worse box.

[@25aceface]

Dave Cutler would probably object to your assertion that NT took inspiration from UNIX...

[@simianinc]

Yup - Gotta give VMS is due

[@geofftefl]

​@@simianincCorrect! In fact, early NT development included significant engineering personnel contribution from DEC which in part led to early availability of NT on the DEC Alpha chip

[@OmegaSparky]

​@@geoffteflI suppose you meant NT's early availability for DEC Alpha.

[@Longlius]

Yeah, that struck me as a strange assertion. NT feels like it was designed from the ground up to be an anti-Unix in the same vein of VMS.

[@25aceface]

BTW there is a good (and VERY long) interview with davec on Dave's Garage: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rpqUfaRtbtJ_m6c@@Longlius

[@johndoh5182]

The survivors of UNIX, two based off of BSD, Open and Free. And then there's a commercial OS, HP-UX which I imagine HP realized they couldn't gouge their customers and make businesses pay an INSANE amount of money just to run a computer. I worked with HP-UX in the 90s as we had HP servers, so it's been around for a long time now.

[@AmandaHuggenkiss]

SGI IRIX was my final foray before succumbing to Windows NT

[@benwlee]

Not to mention unix is the operating system for Jurassic Park

[@ztoob8898]

Now, that's... that's chaos theory.

[@clintcowan9424]

Love your videos. Also the comments and humor of the techs are awesome. Ill never forget where I was during the Unix wars

[@Bankosek]

When i started watching your channel i would've never thought i'd end up watching videos about stuff like this. You make seemingly boring topics exciting.

[@PhilipStorry]

A solid commentary on a sordid time. Thank you!

[@Kneedragon1962]

Once again, outstanding clip. Very well done.

[@TheD3cline]

thanks again for all your work, one of the last great channels left.

[@DavidLindes]

Nice vid! I was around for some of these things playing out... so hearing the tale told brings me back. Would have loved at least a brief mention of IRIX, but ah well. :)

[@wrong1029]

Fantastic video, I appreciate your thorough research.

[@porovaara]

Clarification about the note, NeXSTEP's kernel is from mach but you were correct about the "userland" or programs used within the shell.

[@dancoroian1]

11:08 "he and nobody else ever recalled..." What you meant to say was _"neither_ he _nor anybody_ else ever recalled..." For future reference!

[@excitedbox5705]

I love when you do these history "series" videos. Have you considered doing a series on semiconductor processes/technology like High K Metal gates? A new one hitting the industry in the next year or so is Mears from Atomera and I think ill be as big as High K metal gates. It gives transistors a full node improvement by adding a layer of oxygen impurities under the transistor channel.

[@EmmanuelRosani]

Keep these Unix histories videos coming... Linux topic next!

[@jefferychartier2536]

Great video, thanks for posting!

[@Somelucky]

I love this. I owned a C64 until 1992 when I got my first PC. Sure you can look at a Unix evolution chart, but nothing really pieces it together like these documentaries. AT&T really could have ruled the world with a single OS if they had desired it. The fact that code remnants are still in use today really goes to show how powerful and permanent operating systems can end up being. Even Microsoft is integrating more and more of it with recent versions of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. And I believe Microsoft did use a lot of open Unix code in Windows NT.

[@rokker333]

This was a completely different market and did not compete with PC.

[@rokker333]

@ntfx_org7603 At that time hardware was much more diversified. PCs were not so powerful. Workstations were used professionally and in universities to do engineering and construction software among others. Sun, HP, IBM were on that market to produce such Workstations. And they run on their propriety Unix derivates. It had nothing to do with PC and Microsoft.

[@jackeldogo3952]

When I got my BS back in the late 80s, I went to work for a consulting company. The customer I was assigned to used AT&T 3B2 machines. The machines were good but AT&T service was atrocious. We had so much down time waiting for people or parts. Many years later I picked up a 3B2 box from an auction. It was pretty much stripped except for the PS. I eventually outfitted the box with a Pentium 2 motherboard and peripheral cards, which worked well since the card slots in the case matched the PC standard. I installed a version of Linux on that box and thought of the irony of an old 3B2 running the Unix killer. I wish I would have kept it but gave it away a few years later when I had to move out of state.

[@strayling1]

I remember porting some software to a 3B2. The machine had a key on the front panel which you had to turn before it allowed a root login - an actual physical lockout guarded by a very protective sysop at the site I visited.

[@stargazer7644]

How about all those freakin screws you had to take out to change a card though?!?

[@loaonline]

Back in the day I loved SunOS 4.3 on Sun 3 and Sun 4 workstations and servers I used and managed. Then the new thing was Solaris and I hated it. Just couldn't get used to the different System V based shell commands and tools. Around the same time I got to try out very early version of Slackware on a lowly 486 PC and was amazed. Been using linux some 30+ years now.

[@grizwoldphantasia5005]

Amen. Sun had a good thing, then let their egos kill them. Whether they would have survived any longer without the AT&T baggage, I do not know, but AT&T was poison.

[@magma80]

Still use slack?

[@tomenglishmusic6808]

Outstanding. This is a tangled tale but you’ve managed to tell it clearly and concisely.

[@1pcfred]

Those licensing prices were eye watering. Today Linux has a hard enough time getting users free. I bet if we could afford to pay people what they used to charge we could get some market penetration then. Adjusted for inflation, of course.

[@Junyo]

Cool video. I was "around" for the 1987-1997 "happenings" and was a consultant for IBM, 3COM, Novell, Olivetti and Microsoft in those years and remember all the troubles really well. A wild couple of years 😅

[@powerdude_dk]

Great in-depth review of the history of Unix.

[@KurtisRader]

I worked for Sequent Computer Systems (which pioneered SMP technology using off the shelf microprocessors) during the period covered by this video. I was even deposed by an attorney about this issue after Sequent was purchased by IBM around the year 2000. This video closely matches my memory of the period.

[@ryan_robertson]

Now that's a part of AIX SMP history I didn't know.

[@strayling1]

Were Sequent the ones which had separate BSD and SYSV "universes" which you could select? It made porting software to them a bit of a nightmare.

[@KurtisRader]

Yes, in their original DYNIX/3 OS. Their DYNIX/ptx OS was based on AT&T SVR4. I fixed a serious bug in the SVR4 STREAM pipe implementation.@@strayling1

[@markvalery8632]

@@strayling1 Don't know about Sequent, but Apollo computers had Aegis along with BSD and SYSV (but I think they were wrapped onto Aegis). Wrapped is not the correct word.

[@strayling1]

@@markvalery8632 I'm not familiar with Aegis, but it sounds like the sort of thing Apollo would do. I seem to recall them trying to play both sides in the Open Look vs. Motif wars too.

[@bebokRZly]

When I was in high school, I remember starting my yourney with PC's, installing Linux, FreeBSD etc. I didn't even know about all this stuff in behind backstage at the time :) This is a weird feeling, remembering it so clearly, but at the same time, being aware of how small a chunk of everything you knew back in time at that moment.

[@corkmans8846]

Olivetti mentioned

[@paulwarner5395]

Thanx for the history lesson. In the early 1990s I worked on Boston Tech voicemail systems running on SCO UNIX . Very reliable compared to MS DOS systems.

[@420_gunna]

I LOVE THIS CHAANNNNNNEEEEEELLL

[@Longlius]

I guess I should say something - Virtual Memory was not an exclusive feature to specific flavors of Unix. Every version of Unix had virtual memory. It's, in fact, a prerequisite for multiuser operating systems to function. And neither Unix nor Multics were the first ones to use it. I believe what you may be talking about is mmap(2) which is a set of system calls allowing for the mapping of files into memory rather than virtual memory in general. mmap(2) emerged as an ad hoc thing in BSD which later became part of its specification in the 4.2BSD manual (and was later elevated to part of POSIX). Memory-mapped files were not exactly a Unix-specific feature though, but rather one BSD copied from other minicomputer and mainframe operating systems like TOPS-20.

[@peterfireflylund]

Unix didn’t originally have virtual memory. When it got it, it was originally a rather dumb form that didn’t use pages. It took a while before the machines people wanted to run Unix on had paging MMUs.

[@JohnBayko]

Virtual memory is not required for multiuser operating systems. Many multiuser OSes didn’t have it, one prominent example was OS/9 Level 1, popular on the Radio Shack Color Computer (8 bit, 64K RAM). Also, there were many types of virtual memory, the oldest in Unix was process swapping, where the memory for an entire process was written to and read from disk as needed. Modern VM uses page swapping, where fixed size pages are used, based on metrics like how recently or often they are accessed, and shared when read only (copied only if written to). The complexity of modern virtual memory took a lot of research and try, implement, and often port from other systems (IBM mainframes, research projects, and so on).

[@rogercrew2772]

Also at 3:42, AT&T Information Systems was one of the major divisions of AT&T following the 1983 breakup (the other being the long-distance company AT&T Communications), it was *not* "the UNIX division" (3:42), rather it was the computer equipment manufacturing and software subsidiary that AT&T was allowed to create (out of the remains of Western Electric and other stuff) as part of the deal. Managing UNIX would have been part of it but by no means the biggest one.

[@Johnnyde94v2]

Thanks!

[@lagcisco]

You are a legend for making this

[@rager1969]

OK, this video was more encompassing than the one I just watched by you.

[@caleballen4721]

This is really great work, thank you. The history of the personal computer is relatively well known, but the OS wars are not. Nearly all computers today (besides Windows) run some descendant of Unix and yet the events leading up to that aren't as well known

[@jnb756]

Remembering the 90's with AIX on the back end and Novell Netware/Windows on the front end makes me shudder inside

[@markvalery8632]

I understood where AIX was coming from when I had to work on IBM workstations since I worked for IBM around 1998. It was way too complicated for me. I was familiar with SunOs, Solaris, and Ultrix and didn't want all the enterprise stuff that AIX had. AFS was good, kerberos tokens,... but way more than I needed. Still remember when I said during a meeting I would set up a small Solaris cluster to mimic a customers install so we could debug things. I was told that I couldn't. I said, no its very easy, it will be done in a couple of days. People in the meeting said they will know and they will come for you. I asked who was "they". They said "they" was "them" and it wasn't allowed. Dumbfounded I just said ok. After the meeting I set a small cluster and waited. "They" never showed up, but I left before a year was up.

[@squirlmy]

@@markvalery8632 do you remember Beowolf clusters? It was a nice intuititve way to bring a bunch of linux boxes together, and I remember thinking "why wasn't this done long ago?"

[@AngelosLakrintis]

Loved it and had no idea what UNIX Wars were about until I watched the video. You should a similar story on real time operating systems next 😉

[@panagiotischagias4119]

I love your content, truly!!!

[@MatthewDoye]

We're now left with AIX, HP's offering, two variants of Solaris, four of BSD, and Darwin/MacOS.

[@jeffreyhunt1727]

Excellent video!!!

[@russianvideovlogguy]

This is incredible thank you

[@simonabunker]

Great video! I only started working after this was over - I used SGI IRIX as it was being phased out in favour of Linux. It does seem that Redhat is taking over the mantle from AT&T as the most influential voice in the room (for better or worse). The libraries may be more standard, but the Linux platform is still pretty fractured - it has just moved up a few layers of abstraction - such as installers and desktop environments. This is where Windows does have an advantage - a unified user experience (and strong backwards compatibility) make it an easier desktop environment for most non technical users.

[@Arivia1]

"Santa Cruz Operations" uh-oh (I know it's not the same company but definitely foreshadowing!)

[@guilherme5094]

Thanks guys👏👏👏!!

[@lorensims4846]

Oh, I remember that David and Goliath cartoon from ComputerWorld! Yeah, Unix got really interesting with the release of 386BSD. I followed all this in the computer magazines and in the early '90s it was quite exciting! It's just one of the reasons I just finished downloading FreeBSD 14 to run under VMware Fusion on my M1 MacBook Air.

[@awuuwa]

finally some unix content, it's too rare to see good documentary types on the topic ^-^

[@grantmillard8387]

Retired from an IT career spanning nearly 5 decades I remember so many of these platforms, logo's, icons and mascots. It was an interesting time to be involved in the computer industry. Before the required skillsets became so commoditized and available that it wasn't a career that promised anything but overtime and a lack of respect from users and management. Those were the days when saying, "I'm in computers.", meant something.

[@Brandon-rc9vp]

back in the days when the SEC and courts actually took the impact to the consumer into account when making decisions...

[@Mordecrox]

Well, not everyone had access to those, Berkeley blue bloods were the underdog ragtag bunch of misfits for crying out loud, so of course SEC cared when the average user could pay a spite entrance fee of 20k and be happy about it.

[@RonJohn63]

1:36 The Lions Book.

[@TouYubeTom]

please continue the series!

[@subliminalvibes]

No, my father didn't fight in the UNIX wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter!

[@5roundsrapid263]

SCO? I haven’t heard that name in a very long time. Since, oh, before you were born…

[@JohnnieWalkerGreen]

May the fork() be with you!

[@alexandersichwardt3652]

Not mentioning SGIs IRIX for at least few seconds is a crime. They had a full version of doom to play with best sound coming from the machine as a demo disc. OpenGL pioneers.

[@davidbarker7030]

I remember the multi-player network version of Battlezone on the SGI from 1994

[@ciCCapROSTi]

This was really informative. I used all kinds of shit, but since all implement POSIX more or less and have the GNU utilities, never really differentiated between them. Our big rack servers run Solaris or RedHat IIRC, but since I didn't have to care about it on the code level and testing was very simple, I never bothered to look up what is exactly the difference.

[@LAG09]

Its worth pointing out that up until its breakup AT&T was a regulated monopoly and the breakup happened when it was discovered that they were still engaged in very heavy handed monopolistic business practices. After its breakup the prices of long distance phone calls, their bread and butter, more than halved in price.

[@remka2000]

Extremely interesting, as always, thanks a ton. I always took Unix/Linux for granted, since the beginning of the internet age. I had no idea it had such a convoluted history.

[@1pcfred]

This video doesn't cover why UNIX was made though. Legend has it that Ken and Dennis made UNIX because they wanted to play a video game called Space War. So they developed the C programming language to code it and UNIX as the OS. Later on some bean counters saw what they did and figured they could monetize it. At the Labs you could do whatever you wanted to as long as you filed 3 patents a year. That was the workload. Place was a nuthouse.

[@remka2000]

@@1pcfred I think this was a bit covered in the first episode? It is not obvious that this is a part 2.

[@1pcfred]

@@remka2000 I was not aware that this is a second part at all. So thanks for telling me. It's not obvious at all this is part 2.

[@edeggermont]

Can you tell us more about SCO's Unixware please?

[@Sven_Dongle]

Fun fact: DEC always favored it's own OS VMS over unix, which was written by Dave Cutler, who left DEC and took his codebase to Microsnot where the core of VMS became the heart of Windoze NT.

[@davidbarker7030]

I didn't know that. I worked with DEC VMS in the 80's but never knew that it led to MS NT.

[@BangBangBang.]

*shakes his head* I saw a lot of things in my service during the Unix wars.

[@aniksamiurrahman6365]

The most valuable thing I understood from this video is that - MS Window has never been a platform, precisely because its own creator barred it from being so.

[@Underestimated37]

Windows is the greatest scam to ever exist in the computing space, Microsoft uses dirty tactics to get their software into educational institutions for free, to create early indoctrinated converts to windows and office, they lock up hardware vendors with exclusivity contracts, software is frequently buggy, with fixes needed for problems today that have existed most of the OS’s life. And increasingly Microsoft is trying to force users to hand over their personal information in order to even boot the system for the first time. They’ve successfully incorporated indoctrination, good PR, closed standards, strategic acquisitions and trust violating EEE tactics to make themselves the de facto choice for someone buying a computer, they’ve essentially brainwashed their users into accepting worse and worse violations of their trust and loss of usability over time and have used their considerable sway to suffocate innovation and competition. The fact that no truly successful antitrust suit has been brought against them and been used to split the company up is a massive concern, and I actually wonder when the tipping point will be for it to happen, considering the implications of the recent Activision merger on the industry, and the fact that it didn’t cause a serious review of Microsoft’s tactics, I’m concerned that they’ll just get worse and worse as time goes on.

[@paulyaron2410]

So many memories- I have a poster still over my desk titled “UNIX Feuds”. While on the topic of AT&T wounds, perhaps a video on ISDN (I smell dollars now) or service Net-2000 😢

[@mubashir3]

I had ISDN service back in the mid 90s. I had never heard of the, "I smell dollars now" acronym until now. I got a good laugh out of it.

[@jschoofs]

@@mubashir3 Alternative: innovations subscribers don't need 😉

[@tobiasd.356]

ISDN seem to be such a different story on both sides of the pond. In Germany during the 2000s most companies and a lot of homes (especially those with kids who could use telephones) had ISDN service. We even had an ISDN internet flatrate before finally switch to ADSL.

[@jschoofs]

@@tobiasd.356 I think Germany was probably the only country successfully rolling out ISDN. It was never a big hit in other countries including those in Europe. Typical old-style CCITT committee design resulting in a lot of incompatibilities or “options” as the monopolistic telco’s called them without major added value for the end user. And in Belgium it was pretty expensive too!

[@paulyaron2410]

@@mubashir3 Marketing: Integrated Services Digital Network, Sales: I Smell Dollars Now, Engineering: I Still Don’t Know (No). Multics was Many Useless Tables In Core Simultaneously.

[@damnhatesyou]

I cannot imagine today, the monopoly breaking themselves up, let alone the US government suing companies for being monopoly.

[@AzaTht]

17:30 "developers developers developers" 😂

[@MarkFrischknecht6502]

Nextstep uses the mach code for the kernel and 4.3 Reno for the rest.

[@deathdoor]

10:00 the elusive Sparc processors... Wish I could find some good video here on YT telling the story of those chips. If only there was a channel out there that could make a video about those processors...

[@1pcfred]

We were demolishing a place and came across a pizza box. All we had was a crowbar to open it up. So we did but let me tell you they really built those things. We were impressed by the amount of abuse we had to apply. They just don't make them like they used to.

[@paul_boddie]

RetroBytes made a video entitled "The history of SPARC, its not just a Sun thing", but I haven't watched it to determine its accuracy.

[@herberttlbd]

I can guarantee that if there is one thing you can say that would make Dave Cutler angry it's that Windows NT took any inspiration from Unix.

[@Kevin_Kennelly]

Actually, it was VMS internals that showed up in NT. And when it was discovered, rather than going to court, DEC had Microsoft agreed to port NT onto DEC's ALPHA chip.

[@herberttlbd]

@@Kevin_Kennelly Dave Cutler was the lead on both VMS and NT and he hates Unix.

[@somewhereminnesota9305]

@@herberttlbdmust be tough for him. The world voted and his works join the pile of obsolete technology. He has a lot of company.

[@herberttlbd]

@@somewhereminnesota9305 I don't know if I would say that. My primary has been various Unix/BSD/Linux systems for thirty years but I've been supporting NT for companies since NT4 to pay the bills and, for enterprise end-users and vertical market apps, it is hardly obsolete. From Cutler's recent interview on Dave's Garage, it appears that XBox is running the NT kernel so it is in that space as well.

[@somewhereminnesota9305]

⁠@@herberttlbdRemnants will remain for much longer. zOS and menagerie are still running far older junk. IBMi (AS/400) is another. The real question is whether any significant number of new applications are designed for them. While I’m sure there are still niche use cases they are insignificant in number.

[@AlanTheBeast100]

My first exposure to Unix was hp-9000 (server) UX around 1995(?) where I learned just enough to help an engineer get started on a thermal modelling project with SPICE. (Use a resistor mesh to simulate thermal conduction through a part). Various sub-labs used Unix but I didn't get into it much. The co. was "IBM mainframe" and "IBM-PC". though our division ended up with a PDP-11 and VAX-785 (and some hp-2100/1000's). When I bought my first Mac (2007), I got "unix-curious". Can't say I'm all that expert at it, but a lot of my code calls Unix via unix terminal commands and occasional pipes between programs. While Macs are Unix compliant I'd be curious to know how much of the OS was actually Unix _dependent_ anymore.

[@jaymacpherson8167]

I had a job that required QA testing a specific software program on Unix, AIX, SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and Windows (along with the respective hardware). While I had far more experience with Windows before this job started, I liked SunOS the most.

[@siberx4]

"Six measly files" oh, how the times change (when money is involved). The Sun/Google Java/Android case centered basically entirely around whether Sun could copyright and trademark the _function signatures_ of the Java specification; the very first line of each function that just tells you its name and what parameters and return values it has. Lines that, in and of themselves, execute no code whatsoever. Great video though, I enjoyed it. It would be enjoyable to see your take on the entire long SCO Linux debacle.

[@JeremyMcMillan]

Very few mistakes! Good job. It was a mess and writing this story was more fun than I'd like to have.

[@NathanaelLierly]

I love this so damn much

[@mog068]

Very nicely done. This is my life: Atari>IBM PC DOS>Windows 3.1>Windows NT>Win7, Win10, OSX>Open standards in the present time. I still develop for Win10, Linux, and ROM-DOS (believe it or not, though hoping to shut that down this year.). Now it's all Python and JavaScript.

[@BoGy1980]

fantastic followup on "the rise of unix" ... people should need to know what heritage they have in their hands when they're making phonecalls... There's still code from the '60s and '70s, working TODAY in everyones' smartphone, router, TV, computer, console, .....

[@joeturner7959]

It was called, in 1982 ~ 1984, Zee-nix or Xenix. MS started on the DEC VAX, and ported it to Motorola, and Intel, and ... the 68000 port on RadioShack hardware became the most popular Unix. Dennis Ritche took notice. IBM Switched sides from AT&T/IX/Interactive to IBM Xenix/Microsoft. SCO brought a port that ran the base system on an IBM XT, like Venix. Its a complex thing that happened... I am studying it now, even though I was there in the middle of it.

[@ggoedert]

I am not an apple fan, but I think MacOS is actually an certified Unix system, unlike other much more unix like oses such as linux or the free bsd distributions... :-D I think they went thought that to simplify some legal disputes and appeal to some organizations that had the checklist requirement for an OS...

[@mubashir3]

"I think MacOS is actually an certified Unix system, unlike other much more unix like oses such as linux or the free bsd distributions" I am not sure if I have ever seen anybody ask for a "certified Unix" in the past 20 years or so. Most businesses, including companies Like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, just use Linux without a thought given to "certified Unix".

[@ggoedert]

@@mubashir3 yeah sure, but I guess that for a gimmicky OS like MacOS, its always a plus when you can at least say that...

[@Steven_Edwards]

I believe it was OS X 10.4.x line that was certified

[@1pcfred]

The main reason Linux isn't certified is some of the requirements are deemed too stupid to comply with. So devs simply refuse to implement them. You can't make volunteers do what they don't want to. Although I think a lot of Linux devs are paid today. So now I suppose not complying is more tradition than anything else. The whole GNU is not UNIX thing.

[@refactorear]

Coming soon, SCO vs IBM! Can't wait for that!

[@DorkAhoy]

I recall first seeing an AT&T 3B2 where major portions of the Unix standard library (like printf()) were implemented as instructions in the hardware.

[@paul_boddie]

Not too sure about printf, but string library functions are supported fairly closely by hardware instructions provided by the WE 32000.

[@Californiansurfer]

❤❤❤. I found my Unix books 1988. Damn, remember Cerritos college, that was my research and development play ground , remember 1995 mosaic and graphics changed everything.. 😅

[@largezo7567]

I love this unix series