The programmers finally got their own computers, Unix was born, and it received great attention and spread.

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Editor’s note: You may not know that the competing operating systems of Android and iOS are actually derived from the same system – Unix, and until now, they still provide support for these two operating systems.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the birth of Unix. At the time, this operating system, which almost drove all smartphones, was actually a product of a project failure. The programmers of the developer’s system did not receive support and could only use computers that others had left unused.

From a failed project to everywhere, in the early days of Unix, what happened? Ars Technica recently published a long article on the development of this project. The original title of the article is “Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure” by RICHARD JENSEN. Compile, I hope to bring you inspiration.

Note: This article is longer and is published in three parts. This is the third part.

Unix 50 years: Android and iOS operating systems, from the same failed project (1)

Unix 50 years: Android and iOS operating systems, from the same failed project (2)

Unix 50 years: Android and iOS operating systems, from the same failed project (3)

From Bell Labs’ cafeteria to our modern mobile phone

Although the lab did not pay close attention to when the researchers went to work, in the summer, Kennedy did his best to maintain normal working hours. But Thompson and Richie relaxed a little.

The working hours of both of them are extremely irregular. Thompson told the Unix Oral history project that he used to work 27 hours a day, which made him out of sync with other people’s 24 hours a day.

Rich is just a traditional night owl.

Therefore, the time spent by these three developers is mostly at lunch time.Even at that time, sometimes Kennedy would call Thompson and Richie’s home to remind them when Bell Labs’ cafeteria was closed.

In the cafeteria, three developers discussed the basics of the file manager for this new operating system and barely noticed that employees cleaned up the garbage around them.

They also studied the system in the office of the computer science department. McIlroy’s office is opposite Kennedy, and he remembers that summer they always worked around a blackboard.

In the end, when they have more or less perfected the file management system in concept, it is time to actually write the code. The words of these three people were written very badly, and they decided to use the laboratory’s oral service.

One of them called the lab extension and entered the entire code base into the tape recorder. As a result, some unidentified office workers or staff quickly encountered a hassle task and tried to convert it into a print file.

Of course, this process is not perfect. Among the various errors, “inode” is returned as “eye node”, but the output is still seen as a significant improvement over various graffiti.

In August 1969, Thompson’s wife and son went to Berkeley for three weeks to visit their families. Thompson decided to use this time to write an assembler, a file editor, and a kernel that manages the PDP-7 processor.

This will make this group of file managers a mature operating system. He generously assigned a week to each task.

Thompson completed his mission almost on time. By September, the computer science department at Bell Labs had an operating system running on the PDP-7, and it was not Multics.

The PDP-7 did not have a tape drive or hard drive at the time, and the system “started” by entering a punched paper into it. Since there are no additional drives, their hard-developed file systems have to wait for a while, but they have a good multi-user time-sharing environment to run.

This team still feels this is an achievement and named its operating system “UNICS”, the abbreviation of “UNIplexed Information and Computing System”.

Unix 50 years: Android and iOS operating systems, from the same failed project (3)

Seventh Edition Unix is ​​an important early version of the Unix operating system since 1979. This is the last version promoted by Bell Labs before AT&T commercialized Unix.

In November of that year, Thompson’s debriefing report contained a description of the new operating system he built.

In the summer of 1970, the team had installed a tape drive on the PDP-7, and their booming operating system provided programmers with more and more tool choices (some of which still exist today).

However, despite the success, Thompson, Canadi and Rich were rejected by lab management when they applied for a brand new computer.

Until the end of 1971, the Department of Computer Science had a truly modern computer. In the past year or so, the Unix team has developed several tools to automatically format text files for printing.

They did this to simplify the documentation of the projects they loved, but their tools spread out and were used by several researchers elsewhere on the top floor.

At the same time, the lab’s legal department is prepared to spend a lot of money on a mainframe program called “AstroText.”

When the wind heard, the Unix staff realized that they needed only a little effort to upgrade their own tools to make it a legal department to prepare for patent applications.

At this time, the Computer Science Department proposed a laboratory management purchase of DEC PDP-11 for document production. Max Matthews proposed to buy from the budget of the acoustics department.

Finally, the management gave in and bought a computer for the Unix team.

In the end, news about the operating system leaked out, and companies and organizations with PDP-11 began to contact Bell Labs to buy their new operating system. The lab agrees to provide a free copy and only charges postage and storage.

In this way, they created a history of technology.

In the late 1970s, a copy of the operating system was passed to the University of California at Berkeley, where in the early 1980s, programmers converted it to run on a PC.

The Unix version they developed, the BSD operating system, was selected by NeXT developers.

NeXT was founded by Steve Jobs after leaving Apple in 1985. When Apple acquired NeXT in 1996, BSD becameThe starting point for OS X and iOS.

The free distribution of Unix was discontinued in 1984, when the US government split AT&T, and the previous agreement to ban the company from profiting from many of Bell Labs’ inventions expired.

However, the Unix community is used to free software, so Richard Stallman and others are known when AT&T will soon charge for all copies of Unix and prohibit modification of the source code. The company began to recreate Unix using software distributed to anyone free of charge. They called their project “GNU” and there were no restrictions on the changes.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a college student in Helsinki, Finland, used several GNU tools to write an operating system kernel that could run on a PC.

His software, eventually called Linux, became the foundation of the Android operating system in 2004.

Translator: Scale.