The Computer Chronicles - UNIX (1985)

there was a time when UNIX was an operating system used only by the computer elite people working on mainframes like this on Dow 580 which is in fact the world's largest UNIX computer system but nowadays UNIX is showing up on personal computers in fact UNIX is running this RadioShack 16b why all the excitement about UNIX and more units become the next ms-dos we'll find out as we take a look at UNIX the operating system on this edition of the computer chronicles the computer chronicles is brought to you in part by mcgraw-hill publishers of popular computing magazine featuring micro computer applications that increase productivity for managers and professionals welcome to the computer Chronicles I'm Stuart chef a and this is gary kildall Gary I told a friend of mine we were doing a show on UNIX and he said to me why in the world would you want to feature a unit on a computer show the moral of the story is while some computer people are talking about nothing but UNIX some PC users don't even know what UNIX is why is there the sudden excitement about Unix well it shouldn't be a sudden excitement UNIX itself has been around since the late 60s the problem is that micros haven't had the power to support they haven't had the large amount of mean memory the hard disk the fast processor and so forth but nowadays micros do have that power and so as UNIX becomes a serious contender for an operating system standard okay the fact many people are saying UNIX might become the standard operating system of the future but there are many uses of UNIX going on right now we have a report developed in the late 1960s at Bell Laboratories UNIX was later adopted by the University of California for academic research and publishing at Berkeley's history of science department typesetting of journals and directories is accomplished from start to finish on a network of UNIX based terminals why Unix well apart from the fact that a major version of UNIX was designed at Berkeley it's an eminently portable system from micro too many to mainframe UNIX is easily adapted with few or no changes required the typical UNIX network runs on many computers user initiated tasks are distributed among computers through port selectors but the advantages of UNIX are not limited to multi-user portability the system is also fast and powerful once the user is mastered its unorthodox commands is rewarded with some very sophisticated features like background processing after initiating a task the user can go on to another one while the system continues to work on the first surrounding the kernel of Unix is a shell or central common and interpreter that redirects application input and output manipulates files and stores command sequences the shell structure unlike the commands is friendly allowing even the first time user to perform complex tasks UNIX users give the system high marks for its versatility get up until now it's been largely confined to a small group of specialized users it has proven itself to them now it must prove itself to the rest of us let me introduce you now to our first two guests first of all mark Sobel mark is the author of a book called a practical guide to the UNIX system and John Massey John is now with MIPS computer systems used to be with convergent technologies and used to work on UNIX at Bell Labs Gary a lot of people don't really understand UNIX maybe you can start by giving us a little bit of background well UNIX is a very interesting history and it really has been come down from the mini computer world into micros where a lot of the micro operating systems move themselves up into the high end and they're sort of meeting right in the middle right now a UNIX carries with it the C language of the UNIX file system and the usek in it use it UNIX interface now the file system itself as we're talking about here but the C language is wildly successful it's here right now it's been on a lot of different operating systems now the question about the user interface is still one that we have to address it's considered unfriendly and mark is going to show us an example that and how it's made for a more friendly say with the applications themselves well first I think for people who aren't familiar with UNIX you have a lot of short commands because UNIX was designed for machines for terminals that ran very slowly teletype and command like this will generate a lot of information that well these little interpretation okay what you're seeing more and more today is applications being built with interfaces derived from das okay this application is called file it and it has a 1 2 that is 1 2 3 type of interface takes the place of the typical interface that you would see it's a standard UNIX right user calls up this program or can automatically just log in and be using this program and moves the cursor or this this highlight by pressing the spacebar and there's built-in help press ctrl W and will tell you where you are and you know what what you can do if you get stuck and return just calls up what you so in this case what UNIX does it's really the core of the system it provides the services for this program to get at the file system and so forth but really itself doesn't talk to the user exactly it also provided a environment for the developers to build UNIX and unix-like and I think is the idea of portability of software but as you can move it around to various places and what John what you have the comments about the portability of UNIX itself yeah that is certain probably the most important area of Unix UNIX started on some digital equipment machines and has since been moved to literally 50 or a hundred different kinds of processors that's very important because if you're going to invest a lot of effort in building software it's real helpful to know that you can move it around move it from anything from personal computers through the very largest mainframes means you save a lot of your investment that's also true for software designers that's that's certainly true because a software designer can then take say a language like C and its standard runtime library then you write an application for it and you can not only run on UNIX but say you run a Doss or conquer industry limit that's true if I could actually do that that's how UNIX originally got moved was that people found that you could move C programs very easily it was the environment that was difficult to copy and therefore people got to move Unix machines now one of the criticisms of UNIX has been that it it was unreliable and I think all the UNIX users have have heard that over and over pit in the past years what is the state of it right now in terms of if we're talking about the core system of file system you want that to be very reliable what is the current state of that it's actually fairly good these days you have to understand originally when you got your UNIX system the the normal behavior was to find a guru or wizard and chained him to the machine right therefore when the disk broke he would have someone to pick up the pieces and put them back together that was say 1970 to 73 but as UNIX moved into computer centers and more and more people depended on it a lot of work was done to make it a much more reliable system and actually today it's used in some very fairly demanding applications one of the things that people don't realize is that actually UNIX touches them through the phone system almost every day if you ever want to get your telephone fixed the system that keeps track of all that work is run by UNIX and it has very reliable database all right there's a when we get into something like a micro based system where some of them kick the power cord as they're walking by now there there have been criticisms that at that point and that's that's in a commercial system right it's people like you worried about right and indeed there has been a lot of work that has had to go on to make it a lot more reliable system and it has happened mark I want to go back to your demo for a minute from a user's point of view you've shown me how you consider friendly up UNIX here and make it look like ms-dos but from a user's point of view then why do I care what am I getting from this UNIX based application that I couldn't have been getting from an ms-dos based application there there are two major features that UNIX offers and I would I would emphasize the point that everyone doesn't want UNIX okay if you have an MS system running an application and it's doing what you need it to do maybe UNIX is not what you need however UNIX is a multi-user operating system I can I can do a query look at data at the same time someone else is looking or changing the same data someone else and this is all on the same machine is using word processing system someone is doing graph so it's a multi-user machine everyone doesn't have to fight over the one machine it's also Multi multi tongue-twister multitasking operating system I can be performing my work here while the printer is printing a report and while I'm doing some other processing in the background so I'll be doing this every word and also mention that that's that those that's not the only operating system the microworld does that of course because iBM has announced top view which is a multitasking operating system the course concurrent dose is the same sort of thing and we see again this contention that's taking place right in the middle of unix coming down and these other operating systems coming up and it really points out that I think that a lot of people are looking for that new facility have been able to do multitasking and UNIX is a very good way to do to provide that function can if I can open up another area which is an alternative to a multi-user environment that's becoming that's talked about increasingly its local area networks and I think it's important also to contrast that with a multi-user system and I think it's some at some point in the future that will be a viable alternative right now you don't have your hard standard network you don't have everyone you can't plug every computer into the same network but I think that's something to watch in the future right now there one thing when they asked us on this maybe John answer this is it Allah say top you for example has addressed the problem of standardized graphics interface with VDI from IBM what what's evolving in terms of UNIX standards for standardizing the graphics display so that's that at this point is hard to tell the I guess again the reason there is found in history is that UNIX certainly was done originally for fairly slow speed terminals that interface is pretty well standard UNIX has also gotten fairly standardized in the handling of regular CRTs right there's a normal standard interface there's still an amazing session work on the graphics area and you can particularly particularly see that this is a period where some parts of UNIX have become standard and other parts are under a lot heavy work certainly UNIX is used on anything from personal computer machines through fairly powerful single user workstations I'm afraid to have to interrupt we gotta move on because in just a minute we're going to be two more UNIX experts and we're going to take a look at the new UNIX PC from youlet Packard so stay with us joining us now is Doug Hartman Doug is the manager of UNIX development at youlet Packard and next to Doug Mike Denny a UNIX consultant and the vice president and co-founder of basis which is a UNIX Resource Center in Berkeley one of the key people in the development of UNIX is a man named Bill joy who sometimes called the father of four point two which is the Berkeley version of UNIX reporter Wendy woods has a profile of Bill joy the success of Bill Joy's UNIX 4.2 can best be measured by the success of his own company Sun Microsystems which makes a line of UNIX 4.2 based mini computers and workstations has gone from 6 to over 1,000 employees in three years Sun ships more than seven million dollars worth of equipment each month to the technical and engineering communities which find UNIX 4.2 the ideal operating environment for their specialized software needs but despite his success bill joy isn't allowing his UNIX 4.2 to stagnate he continues to work closely with his university roots to improve on Unix unlike others UNIX has hit the point we're starting to get standardized by standards committees and adopted by and really attempt to get to control the development by major corporations like IBM and AT&T and that that inevitably involves a slowing down of the rate of change in the system as for the future of Unix he says it's open source code versatility and ability to work on a variety of machines means it will be popular with scientists and engineers for some time Unix will be important if it can deliver applications that people want to run the technical market needs more operating system capabilities and you're likely to see from the smaller systems so you know we don't really have an alter into applications delivery vehicle then UNIX but will UNIX ever make it big in the business market bill joy doubts it he says what's needed is a UNIX based business program like Lotus 1-2-3 something big and successful and until that's written he says quote I'm not super hopeful reporting for the computer chronicles I'm Wendy woods still in the last segment we focused in on this issue of user friendliness like I said overworked word micro users have come to expect this idea of a graphical animated communication with their programs and one of the points of a unix being successful is to be able to do that in the micro world Doug is we got an example of what hewlett-packard is done to provide a shell or a bit kind of an animated communication that's right on our integral PC we have an example of using Windows menus that sort of thing to give people a friendlier user interface we can select say a spreadsheet I mean printing the information in the spreadsheet and while that's going on we can be selecting other say graphical windows look Doug there are other computers that don't use UNIX that can do some of the stuff we've seen you know multiple windows and other machines and multitasking what now is special about UNIX here the big thing the use has going for it is the compatibility with various other machines software portability the idea that you can take programs which are written on some other machine bring them to another UNIX pace machine with very little effort makes a software developer's job barriness as we talked about earlier in terms of the C language in the standard runtime library the idea is if an application software writer codes in a machine independent way using say C and the runtime library then it can run on UNIX or can run on concur and dos or under ms-dos and things of that's where it's a very powerful concept for software writers we mentioned before for point two which is the Berkeley version of UNIX and I'd like to clear up what may be some confusion to people we hear about xenix we hear about UNIX I think you call your thing hp-ux we are pci-x system 3 system 54.2 and so on why are there so many versions of UNIX and how do they differ Mike just luck the proliferation of names besides UNIX is dictated by ATT's require you don't call it eunuchs so each manufacturer comes up with their little name for it the most part it is fairly standard xenyx machine looks like eunuchs to me it may have a few extras here and there maybe a couple of things your favorite utility may not be there but to move from even between the so-called berkeley camp and the ATT Bell Labs camp of eunuchs very very strikingly the same y equal leaf and why does the implement of the say the system's programmers feel this need to make local changes are there social in nature what I noticed one example that I had came into it to our computer center and I I asked one of the local programmers said well I don't think the silo statement weren't quite right and he got on there and made modifications to the source code and compiled right into the system right there on the spot so we had a different operating system right there at that very time so because it's so easy to chew make changes to it I think everybody you know adulteries there let's say improves the recipe that they received from Grandma and this case MA and particular manufacturers for example of the receive the official original source code and they're putting implemented on their machine may have particular target markets in mind for example the emphasis on networking workstations is contrasted with an emphasis on multi-user transaction machines for database manager now what about eighty their role in this right now are they trying to say bring these versions back into one standard quite apparently ATT would like to establish define the V standard as system 55.2 and we'll get other decimal points behind in the dotted line there is another kind of de facto standards out of the the so called berkeley 4.2 standard distribution they are in fact quite different code underneath to the outside most user they look very similar with the difference of some utilities it's quite common for a manufacturer probably think of a half-dozen who have adopted ATT eunuchs but put Berkeley utilities on top of so-called extensions seems like that might be the safe place to put their nifty things from Berkeley and then there is the basic gimmicks it's oh now there's another question that comes up I think in the minds of many people is that iBM has a couple of versions of UNIX that they are supporting are they're doing this just to say fill the market out or they are they really trying to get behind the effort in the sense of you think of IBM AT&T as being competitors and it's a little strange to think that IBM might be promoting a competitor's product well and ATT uses IBM computers you know cockles of the organization I I think we would all get rich if we knew the answer to this business with any confidence Doug I want to ask you about your implementation of Unix on something like this we're talking here about a $5,000 PC in the first part of the show we were looking at a 12 to $15,000 a pretty high-end AT&T machine do we lose anything in the implementation here is this the same UNIX the only thing that we've really left out is the hard disk which would allow you to do your own program development by leaving out the hard disk we can reduce the cost but still leave you enough to run applications no I I've read in one of the trades recently that there was talk that Commodore was gonna come out whether it was Unix at that level necessity for you know kind of Mac Mac a lookalike running UNIX is that kind of thing possible certainly technology is there to do that it's really been a question of if the applications are there support the home end-user I think if any kind of a rumor like that were truly would have to get a different from the standard machine you buy on the Kmart imagine trying to get you to explain to you it's right at that level if we could go to let's go back to the core a file system at this point the currently guess is what it might be called operating systems from the micro world right now provide multitasking file lockout record lockout facilities like that what does Unix really offer that is I think you know substantially different it will make it a successful besides its backing by AT&T well I like to take that one I think that with UNIX you've got the promise of being able to offer the same kinds of environments and user interfaces across a broad range computers both at work and at home so that you don't have to relearn everything just because you move to a different but if you're anything inherent in the file system say is special access methods let's say the IBM term net and terminology and indexed sequential access methods or anything really substantially different about the way files are accessed say from the microworld that simply not necessarily though it is a very very flexible sort of least common denominator so that I Sam's can be used on top of the UNIX itself doesn't provide okay so then but they are around most so maybe let's say AT&T is backing in the number of applications and so forth it may determine success of UNIX computer 200 utilities that do handy things don't hurt yeah and some of its emulation one might dare say of UNIX buy ms-dos other products that see concepts and try to implement them UNIX can't claim to be the sole source of such useful functionality okay gentlemen well there are clearly two points of view on whether UNIX will prevail is a new kind of standard operating system and commentator Paul Schindler has some thoughts on that sure I should be using a can opener instead of a screwdriver to open this can of tomato juice I mean a can opener is the appropriate tool for the job well I'm one of those people that feel Unix is the wrong tool in the wrong place in the microcomputer world yeah I know I've heard all the arguments UNIX is so easy to move to new computers UNIX programs are so easy to move from computer to computer well I'm sorry but I think that's just so much Buncombe look let's face a few facts UNIX was developed by a bunch of brilliant programmers at Bell Laboratories they wanted a great mini computer environment to develop software him and that's what they created and that's what UNIX is today a great place to do mini computer software what UNIX is not is what AT&T and a lot of other companies are trying to make it into the ultimate micro computer operating system I don't know enough to say whether it's easy to move UNIX from machine to machine but I do know that applications written for UNIX on one machine don't always work on another there are incompatible UNIX dialects galore UNIX is a user hostile operating system dramatically short on software that's my opinion I'm Paul Schindler in the random-access file this week the Consumer Electronics Show is over and there were no blockbuster new products commodore did show off its new 128 series and promised to ship it later this month commodore also displayed its new UNIX machine and two new IBM compatibles probably the biggest hot new area was robots with new personal robots being shown by several manufacturers Tony introduced a new robot which can be run by your personal computer and Nintendo showed off a game playing robot that interfaces with the game on your computer screen there were robots with synthesized speech and robots that change their facial expressions Atari was a last-minute exhibitor and Confused the st picture even more by showing a new 256 K model which will supposedly sell for $4.99 Atari also unveiled its new cd-rom storage system the disc holds 500 megabytes and will sell for about $500 Atari said it will ship this December what makes you choose one computer over another well performance being equal the most important factor is the design of the keyboard according to a study just completed by a Connecticut design firm buyers may want bells and whistles but they also want a simple looking keyboard contrasting colors on function keys full travel Keys long space bars and a quote substantial look generally meaning thick edges light waves are not only replacing electrons in computer storage but researchers at the Center for applied optics at the University of Alabama say light beams may soon replace electrons in the computer itself the center's director says optical computers using photons and lasers will be smaller use less power and allow for three-dimensional design and more efficient parallel processing the optical research is being funded by the Pentagon which sees optical processing power as essential to an effective Star Wars system our star of the software Wars as Paul Schindler and here's his review for the week they say you can tell how good a word person is by whether they work the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink or in pencil well I got to tell you I don't work it at all but if you do you want to try word maker a truly obscure software package from word of it's at 55 Sutter Street in San Francisco now normally we don't give addresses but these guys aren't in the phonebook and you can't buy word maker in any store this is the software package for word lovers it makes the grandiose claim of including every word in the English language its search technique is a real boon for the crossword puzzle fan if you know how long the word is and can fill in some of the letters you can search through a hundred thousand words and find all those that match what you have now I can't review this package without pointing out that it's command menu is one of the simplest most useful I've ever seen this package used to cost fifty dollars but at that price no one wanted it so word Associates cut the price to $10.00 just over the price of a floppy word maker from word associates 55 Sutter Street San Francisco for the computer chronicles I'm Paul Schindler looking for a word processor and want to know what everyone else is buying well here's the latest list of top sellers leading the pack is IBM's writing assistant followed by Microsoft's word bank street writer from brøderbund and then PFS write and multi mate word star comes in six the Bank of America and Chemical Bank are forming a joint venture with AT&T and time incorporated to expand home banking services into broader based electronics services for home users chemicals pronto and B of A's home banking now have nearly 40,000 subscribers the Defense Department has just completed a study which says that of the 17,000 DoD computers only 30 of them are adequately protected from unauthorized entry the head of computer security for the Pentagon said they are currently vulnerable to any mentally unbalanced 16 year old industrial robot sales are moving right along in the US sales of robots were up 71 percent in the past year there are now nearly 15,000 robots at work in the United States up from less than 10,000 just a year ago finally the tough times in the computer business were evident at last week's CES show in Chicago lots of booth space reserved for computer companies went unused but the space was quickly grabbed up by the makers of x-rated video cassettes apparently that part of the home entertainment business is doing just fine that's it for this week's computer Chronicles we'll see you next time the computer Chronicles is brought to you in part by mcgraw-hill publishers of popular computing magazine featuring micro computer applications and increased productivity for managers and professionals

Channel: The Computer Chronicles

Views: 47,814

Keywords: the, computer, chronicles, stewart, cheifet, gary, kildall, cp/m, vintage, computing, computers, old, ms-dos, dec, vax, mainframe, unix, tv, show, public, access, pbs, bill, gates, ms, dos, microsoft, amiga, commodore, 64, vic20, vic, 20, episodes, full, high, quality, hd, danooct1, tct

Id: 0DdoGPav3fc

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 08 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Bertzijngedacht]

It appears to be the keyboard...

I was watching an old episode of The computer Chronicles, and this small statement form so long ago made me smile :-D

[u/_damnfinecoffee_]

Full travel keys

Miss me with that shit, where muh 40% bois?

[u/tullonator]

Thic edges