[TUHS] Celebrating 50 years of Unix

[TUHS] Celebrating 50 years of Unix

[Caipenghui]

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Unix has a history of 50 years. Unix has a tremendous impact on the Internet. Is Unix ready for the next computing era?

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Re: [TUHS] Celebrating 50 years of Unix

[Andrew Warkentin]

On 10/14/19, Caipenghui <Caipenghui_c@163.com> wrote:
> Unix has a history of 50 years. Unix has a tremendous impact on the
> Internet. Is Unix ready for the next computing era?

I don't think conventional Unix (SysV/BSD/Linux) has aged very well at
all. As far as I'm concerned, all "modern" conventional Unices are
basically cargo cult Unix at this point (especially Linux, but I'd
also say it's true of current BSD and SysV). They're just carrying
forward the architecture of late-70s research Unix without really
understanding the design philosophy. The conventional Unix
architecture was fine on a PDP-11, but it doesn't scale well to
larger, more complex systems. A modern OS should be designed with
security and extensibility in mind.

That being said, I believe it is still possible to write a truly
modern OS that is Unix-like and compatible with programs written for
conventional Unix while still being secure and extensible. That's what
I'm doing with the OS I'm writing <https://gitlab.com/uxrt>. It will
be a thoroughly modern OS that will take the Unix philosophy further
than it's ever been taken before (even further than Plan 9 does) and
will be binary compatible with Linux.