The Tech Culture revolution
by
Mike Houlden
This item begins as a glorious way to show how tech tries to become a very important tool in our lives.Only to be the very thing in which constrains us.
Oldsters know that the computer was never meant to run our lives but to be an important tool for our lives.Why is this? well,the common factor is this. The Visionaries: Steve Jobs,Bill Gates,Linus Torvalds,and Richard Stallman,all had a very different Vision for the PC and how it is run.Bill Gates and Steve Jobs wanted a environment in which only windows users and Mac users can use and nobody but writers for mac,could write for mac and nobody but Microsoft developers and writers can write any programs for windows.This shut out open source completely.Why is this? Well it is for the almighty Dollar.In order to install anything to a mac or windows pc,you'd have to download it from their particular store or repository.They have to OK it before you can install and use it.
Linus Torvalds is the only person who writes and copyrights the Linux kernel core of any distribution or flavor of Linux.Simple as hell.You can change anything you want on any distribution but you cannot change or modify the kernel.
Richard Stallman had a vision of free software.Freedom to use,Freedom to change,freedom to own and freedom to use your pc without being told what you can or cannot do on your computer.And the freedom to freely distribute GNU/Linux without the fears of being in copyright infringement.
Where the four Gentlemen connect is through UNIX.
Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux Kernel (a variant of UNIX)
Richard Stallman used UNIX at MIT and uses UNIX freely
Steve Jobs had Mac software Based on UNIX
Bill Gates distributed UNIX through a licensing agreement with Bell Labs,and later called their distribution XENIX
so one wanted to be free,the other did it as a hobby,the third wanted cash as did the last one... along with their own hardware. Now you see who ripped whom off.
Here is what wikipedia says about unix and it's creators :
Unix (/ˈjuːnɪks/; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, development starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.[3]
The origins of Unix date back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs, and General Electric were developing Multics, a time-sharing operating system for the GE-645 mainframe computer.[14] Multics featured several innovations, but also presented severe problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics, but not by its goals, individual researchers at Bell Labs started withdrawing from the project. The last to leave were Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna,[10] who decided to reimplement their experiences in a new project of smaller scale. This new operating system was initially without organizational backing, and also without a name.
The new operating system was a single-tasking system.[10] In 1970, the group coined the name Unics for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service (pronounced "eunuchs"), as a pun on Multics, which stood for Multiplexed Information and Computer Services. Brian Kernighan takes credit for the idea, but adds that "no one can remember" the origin of the final spelling Unix.[15] Dennis Ritchie,[10] Doug McIlroy,[1] and Peter G. Neumann[16] also credit Kernighan.
Mike Houlden
This item begins as a glorious way to show how tech tries to become a very important tool in our lives.Only to be the very thing in which constrains us.
Oldsters know that the computer was never meant to run our lives but to be an important tool for our lives.Why is this? well,the common factor is this. The Visionaries: Steve Jobs,Bill Gates,Linus Torvalds,and Richard Stallman,all had a very different Vision for the PC and how it is run.Bill Gates and Steve Jobs wanted a environment in which only windows users and Mac users can use and nobody but writers for mac,could write for mac and nobody but Microsoft developers and writers can write any programs for windows.This shut out open source completely.Why is this? Well it is for the almighty Dollar.In order to install anything to a mac or windows pc,you'd have to download it from their particular store or repository.They have to OK it before you can install and use it.
Linus Torvalds is the only person who writes and copyrights the Linux kernel core of any distribution or flavor of Linux.Simple as hell.You can change anything you want on any distribution but you cannot change or modify the kernel.
Richard Stallman had a vision of free software.Freedom to use,Freedom to change,freedom to own and freedom to use your pc without being told what you can or cannot do on your computer.And the freedom to freely distribute GNU/Linux without the fears of being in copyright infringement.
Where the four Gentlemen connect is through UNIX.
Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux Kernel (a variant of UNIX)
Richard Stallman used UNIX at MIT and uses UNIX freely
Steve Jobs had Mac software Based on UNIX
Bill Gates distributed UNIX through a licensing agreement with Bell Labs,and later called their distribution XENIX
so one wanted to be free,the other did it as a hobby,the third wanted cash as did the last one... along with their own hardware. Now you see who ripped whom off.
Here is what wikipedia says about unix and it's creators :
Unix (/ˈjuːnɪks/; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, development starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.[3]
Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), IBM (AIX), and Sun Microsystems (Solaris). In the early 1990s, AT&T sold its rights in Unix to Novell, which then sold its Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in 1995.[4] The UNIX trademark passed to The Open Group, a neutral industry consortium, which allows the use of the mark for certified operating systems that comply with the Single UNIX Specification (SUS). As of 2014, the Unix version with the largest installed base is Apple's macOS.
Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the "Unix philosophy". This concept entails that the operating system provides a set of simple tools that each performs a limited, well-defined function,[5] with a unified filesystem (the Unix filesystem) as the main means of communication,[3] and a shell scripting and command language (the Unix shell) to combine the tools to perform complex workflows. Unix distinguishes itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language, thus allowing Unix to reach numerous platforms.
Overview
Unix was originally meant to be a convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmers.[7][8] The system grew larger as the operating system started spreading in academic circles, as users added their own tools to the system and shared them with colleagues.[9]
At first, Unix was not designed to be portable[6] or multi-tasking.[10] Later, Unix gradually gained portability, multi-tasking and multi-user capabilities in a time-sharing configuration. Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text for storing data; a hierarchical file system; treating devices and certain types of inter-process communication (IPC) as files; and the use of a large number of software tools, small programs that can be strung together through a command-line interpreter using pipes, as opposed to using a single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These concepts are collectively known as the "Unix philosophy". Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike summarize this in The Unix Programming Environment as "the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves".[11]
In an era when a standard computer consisted of a hard disk for storage and a data terminal for input and output (I/O), the Unix file model worked quite well, as I/O was generally linear. In the 1980s, non-blocking I/O and the set of inter-process communication mechanisms were augmented with Unix domain sockets, shared memory, message queues, and semaphores, as well as network sockets to support communication with other hosts. As graphical user interfaces developed, the file model proved inadequate to the task of handling asynchronous events such as those generated by a mouse.
By the early 1980s, users began seeing Unix as a potential universal operating system, suitable for computers of all sizes.[12][13] The Unix environment and the client–server program model were essential elements in the development of the Internet and the reshaping of computing as centered in networks rather than in individual computers.
Both Unix and the C programming language were developed by AT&T and distributed to government and academic institutions, which led to both being ported to a wider variety of machine families than any other operating system.
Under Unix, the operating system consists of many libraries and utilities along with the master control program, the kernel. The kernel provides services to start and stop programs, handles the file system and other common "low-level" tasks that most programs share, and schedules access to avoid conflicts when programs try to access the same resource or device simultaneously. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the division between user space and kernel space — although in microkernel implementations, like MINIX or Redox, functions such as network protocols may also run in user space.
History[edit]
The new operating system was a single-tasking system.[10] In 1970, the group coined the name Unics for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service (pronounced "eunuchs"), as a pun on Multics, which stood for Multiplexed Information and Computer Services. Brian Kernighan takes credit for the idea, but adds that "no one can remember" the origin of the final spelling Unix.[15] Dennis Ritchie,[10] Doug McIlroy,[1] and Peter G. Neumann[16] also credit Kernighan.
The operating system was originally written in assembly language, but in 1973, Version 4 Unix was rewritten in C.[10] Version 4 Unix, however, still had many PDP-11 dependent codes, and was not suitable for porting. The first port to other platform was made five years later (1978) for Interdata 8/32.[17]
Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are collectively referred to as "Research Unix". In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to Donald B. Gillies at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science.[18] UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson, who had worked on the UNIX kernel at Bell Labs, was instrumental in negotiating the terms of the license.[19]
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix (BSD and System V) by commercial startups, including Sequent, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, and Xenix. In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4 (SVR4), which was subsequently adopted by many commercial Unix vendors.
In the 1990s, Unix and Unix-like systems grew in popularity as BSD and Linux distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers. In 2000, Apple released Darwin, also a Unix system, which became the core of the Mac OS X operating system, which was later renamed macOS.[20]
Now you have the complete beginnings to how these operating systems came about.It was fun to learn all of this and their point of origins.
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