UNIX: Difference between revisions
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In 1982, AT&T (the Bell System's holding company) lost a long-running lawsuit with the US Department of Justice, and was forced to divest itself of its local telephone service companies (the baby Bells). In return, they were finally allowed to enter the computer industry, and commercializing UNIX was at the top of their priorities. They changed the licensing such that various parts of the system were "unbundled" or ''a la carte'', making a usable UNIX system much more expensive. This annoyed many people, but there was little they could do about it at the time. In the meantime, the UNIX group at Bell continued working on the original UNIX tree, which eventually became ''UNIX System V'', the basis of all of AT&T and its partners' commercial UNIX offerings. Most vendors ended up merging it with their own code bases (often based on Version 7) and creating their own UNIX variants such as HP-UX (Hewlett-Packard) and AIX (IBM). Direct ports of System V were available from outside porting houses like Interactive Systems. |
In 1982, AT&T (the Bell System's holding company) lost a long-running lawsuit with the US Department of Justice, and was forced to divest itself of its local telephone service companies (the baby Bells). In return, they were finally allowed to enter the computer industry, and commercializing UNIX was at the top of their priorities. They changed the licensing such that various parts of the system were "unbundled" or ''a la carte'', making a usable UNIX system much more expensive. This annoyed many people, but there was little they could do about it at the time. In the meantime, the UNIX group at Bell continued working on the original UNIX tree, which eventually became ''UNIX System V'', the basis of all of AT&T and its partners' commercial UNIX offerings. Most vendors ended up merging it with their own code bases (often based on Version 7) and creating their own UNIX variants such as HP-UX (Hewlett-Packard) and AIX (IBM). Direct ports of System V were available from outside porting houses like Interactive Systems. |
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At around the same time, a researcher at MIT's AI Lab named Richard Stallman decided he was fed up with Boston-area startups taking ideas from the AI Lab and "hoarding" them. His main concern was that, once the source to various parts of an OS were "closed" or made unavailable, fixing or improving on them was impossible (or, at least, extremely difficult). He envisioned a complete operating system where all of the parts were "free software" and could be modified and changed at will, but with the caveat that the changes had to be shared with others as well. He called his vision "GNU", a |
At around the same time, a researcher at MIT's AI Lab named Richard Stallman decided he was fed up with Boston-area startups taking ideas from the AI Lab and "hoarding" them. His main concern was that, once the source to various parts of an OS were "closed" or made unavailable, fixing or improving on them was impossible (or, at least, extremely difficult). He envisioned a complete operating system where all of the parts were "free software" and could be modified and changed at will, but with the caveat that the changes had to be shared with others as well. He called his vision "GNU", a [[Recursive Acronym]] for "GNU's Not UNIX!", posted a manifesto describing his intentions to Usenet in 1983, and created the Free Software Foundation to oversee the effort. By 1990, the FSF would have most of the parts of GNU ready, including a compiler, utilities and such, but no kernel to go with it. |
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On the other side of the US, in Silicon Valley, some of the Berkeley researchers, along with hardware designers from Stanford, got together to make the first computers designed specifically to run UNIX, called ''workstations''. The most famous of these was Sun Microsystems, named after the Stanford University Network, a part of the ARPANET, the ancestor of the Internet. Other companies, like Silicon Graphics, soon followed, and even companies that historically had ignored UNIX before (HP and IBM) got into the fold with the HP 9000 (running HP/UX) and the IBM RT-PC (running either AIX or EOS, a BSD derivative). |
On the other side of the US, in Silicon Valley, some of the Berkeley researchers, along with hardware designers from Stanford, got together to make the first computers designed specifically to run UNIX, called ''workstations''. The most famous of these was Sun Microsystems, named after the Stanford University Network, a part of the ARPANET, the ancestor of the Internet. Other companies, like Silicon Graphics, soon followed, and even companies that historically had ignored UNIX before (HP and IBM) got into the fold with the HP 9000 (running HP/UX) and the IBM RT-PC (running either AIX or EOS, a BSD derivative). |
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