Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 1st Jul 2009 20:19 UTC
"Earlier this year, people in many places wrote about the 40th anniversary of the moment Ken Thompson sat down and started to work on UNIX (which is actually in August). In fact, UNIX celebrates another birthday this year, even though on a slightly smaller scale. In July 1974, exactly 35 years ago, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson published the first version of their seminal paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System in the Communications of the ACM."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
I may be the only one here with that opinion, but I think we should work towards retiring Unix. Sure enough, Unix has done great things for us, but we shouldn't consider it the ultimately perfect system. A lot of things have changed in the last 35 years in terms of who uses computers and how they use computers. And we have to ask ourselves, is Unix the best tool for that or are there better approaches?
As just one example, files in Unix are typically single forks of an anonymous byte stream - in the beginnings of Unix, this was sufficient, since the vast majority of data was English text stored on tape drives. Nowadays, we have videos with multiple audio tracks and subtitles in multiple languages. Is a single fork linear file still appropriate? Or could we envision a file system that uses mulitiple forks, where the audio streams could appear to an audio editor as a pure mp3 or wav file, the subtitles appear to a text editor as if they were an ASCII file and let the GIMP see it as a large collection of images?
I think it's time to build the Unix of the 21st century.
Edited 2009-07-02 17:52 UTC