Excellent responses here. Brings back so many great memories. My 1 cent would be to ask the question: Which of today's Unix variants (Linux, BSD, AIX, Cygwin, ...) is closest to the philosophy of the Ken-Denis-Doug versions of V6 Unix? All the variants I see today suffer from "complexification" - a John Mashey term. Documentation of commands today has grown 5 to 10 fold for each command in /usr/bin. V7 had less than 64 well documented system calls. Today's Linux, AIX, and others have how many? I don't know. The concept of producing a stream of text as the output of a program that does simple jobs well has been replaced by "power-shell" thinking of passing binary objects rather than text between program - a decidedly non-portable idea. Passing "objects" requires attaching to a dynamically linked library (that will change or even disappear with the next release of the OS or the object library). With Research Unix, I could pipe the output of a Unix program running on an Intel 486 to another program running on a Motorola 68000 or a Zilog Z80000 or an IBM AIX machine. IPhones, iPads, and my Android tablet don't have a usable text editor. All non-Unix text editors seem to struggle to offer a fixed width font. (Ever try to make columns line up on an iPhone or Android tablet?) Complexification rears its ugly head. I still use vi on both my Mac and PC (Cygwin). (I can't find a usable gvim for Mac and Macvim is weird but doesn't seem to know what a mouse is.) Unix brought automation to the forefront of possibilities. Using Unix, anyone could do it - even that kid in Jurassic Park. Today, everything is GUI and nothing can be automated easily or, most of the time, not at all. Unix is an ever shrinking oasis in a desert of non-automation and complexity. It is the loss of automation possibilities that frustrates me the most. (Don't mind me, I'm just outgassing for no good reason.) Ed On Thu, Jun 6, 2024 at 3:06 PM Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: > Ralph Corderoy wrote in > <20240606095502.AD4EE210F4@orac.inputplus.co.uk>: > |There's a chart of the connections between Unix versions at > |https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_systems, though I dislike the > |lack of direction given there are some arcs with little incline. > |It says it's based on https://www.levenez.com/unix/ where Éric notes his > |chart is not limited to just source-code transfer. > > I also admire that FreeBSD and NetBSD keep on maintaining the > bsd-family-tree (and in the original form, not that dots thing, or > how it was called). So that starts with > > First Edition (V1) > | > Second Edition (V2) > | > Third Edition (V3) > | > Fourth Edition (V4) > | > Fifth Edition (V5) > | > Sixth Edition (V6) -----* > \ | > \ | > \ | > Seventh Edition (V7)----|----------------------* > \ | | > \ 1BSD | > 32V | | > \ 2BSD---------------* | > \ / | | > \ / | | > \/ | | > 3BSD | | > | | | > 4.0BSD 2.79BSD | > | | | > 4.1BSD --------------> 2.8BSD <-* > | | > 4.1aBSD -----------\ | > | \ | > 4.1bBSD \ | > | \ | > *------ 4.1cBSD --------------> 2.9BSD > / | | > Eighth Edition | 2.9BSD-Seismo > | | | > +----<--- 4.2BSD 2.9.1BSD > ... > > and says > > Multics 1965 > UNIX Summer 1969 > DEC PDP-7 > First Edition 1971-11-03 [QCU] > DEC PDP-11/20, Assembler > Second Edition 1972-06-12 [QCU] > 10 UNIX installations > Third Edition 1973-02-xx [QCU] > Pipes, 16 installations > Fourth Edition 1973-11-xx [QCU] > rewriting in C effected, > above 30 installations > Fifth Edition 1974-06-xx [QCU] > above 50 installations > Sixth Edition 1975-05-xx [QCU] > port to DEC Vax > Seventh Edition 1979-01-xx [QCU] 1979-01-10 [TUHS] > first portable UNIX > .. > > with a nice Bibliography with falsely underscored headline plus > > URL: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/share/misc/bsd-family-tree > > It also covers the system most of you are using (later). > > --steffen > | > |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, > |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one > |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off > |(By Robert Gernhardt) > -- Advice is judged by results, not by intentions. Cicero