[OT] Old Unix tales :) [was: What's a script?]

[Joep L. Blom]

Siggy Brentrup wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 19:21 +0100, Peter Hillier-Brook wrote:
>> Joep L. Blom wrote:
>> [cut]
>>
>>> We used our first Unix in 1979 acquiring 9 tapes from Bell labs and 
>>> installed in on a PDP-11. It was developed as Kernigan & Richie were
>>>  fed-up with the slow multitasking in the current DEC OS (I thought
>>> it was RSTS but I am not sure). Talking about old gees in
>>> computerland.... Joep
>>>
>> Not exactly. UNIX was designed by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and 
>> others, starting in 1969 after AT&T withdrew from the Multics project. 
>> Brian Kernighan joined AT&T around this time and is probably best known 
>> for being the 'K' in awk.
>>
>> The best historical document for UNIX is the AT&T Bell Laboratories 
>> Technical Journal of October 1984 (Vol.63 No.8 Part 2). No, my copy is 
>> not for sale at any price. :-)
> 
> I understand that, before I lost all my library in a fire in '97, I owned
> an even earlier one. In a previous post I mentioned an famous article in
> Bell Labs Tech Journal from '70 that I owned - memory didn't serve well.
> A little research led me to this historically interesting link:
> 
>   http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/cacm.html
> 
> It mentions historical versions of the article, now I think I owned
> CACM, 17, No. 7 (July 1974).
> 
> I'm writing this on a SGI Indy R5k I'm currently reactivating to run
> Debian testing, cf .signature.
> 
> That's a fine rugged piece of engineering in contrast to to the crap
> they sell nowadays, it's a pity it's so slooooow, no gnome then, just
> icewm.
> 
> cu
>   Siggy
I Remember that one very well! I sold mine 3 years ago to someone with a 
real fancy for old SGI equipment. As a company we sold many of them
Internally 64-bit external 32 and a memory-control system of which Intel 
only can dream (NUMA). We even sold (and played with) it's big brother, 
the Octane. I think my current 4-core AMD Phenom II ( bought a week ago) 
at last can compete with it and don't forget the price differences!! 
Nowadays you get unbelievable power for a unbelievably low price. And 
these systems were really indestructible!
Joep