Today, every Unix-like system can trace their ancestry back to the original Unix. That includes Linux, which uses the GNU tools – and the GNU tools are based on the Unix tools. Linux in 2024 is removed from the original Unix design, and for good reason – Linux supports architectures and tools not dreamt of during the original Unix era. But the core command line experience in Linux is still very similar to the Unix command line of the 1970s. The next time you use ls to list the files in a directory, remember that you’re using a command line that’s been with us for more than fifty years.
↫ Jim Hall
An excellent overview of some of the more ancient UNIX commands that are still with us today. One thing I always appreciate when I dive into an operating system closer to “real” UNIX, like OpenBSD, or a actual UNIX, like HP-UX, is just how much more logical sense they make under the hood than a Linux system does. This is not a dunk on modern Linux – it has to cater to endless more modern needs than something ancient and dead like HP-UX – but what I learn while using these systems closer to the UNIX has made me appreciate proper UNIX more than I used to in the past.
In what surely sounds like utter lunacy to system administrators who actually had to seriously administer HP-UX systems back in the day, I genuinely love using HP-UX, setting it up, configuring it, messing around with it, because it just makes so much more logical sense than the systems we use today. The knowledge gained from using BSD, HP-UX, and others, while not always directly applicable to Linux, does aid me in understanding certain Linux things better than I did before.
What I’m trying to say is – go and load up an old UNIX, or at least a modern BSD. Aside from being great operating systems in their own right, they’re much easier to grasp than a modern Linux system, and you’ll learn a lot form the experience.
You can get Xenix for free from winworld, then install it on PCEmu and customize it to your liking.
Why look at old UNIX when you could instead look at modern 9Front (Plan 9)?
Bell labs team that created Unix realised they could do it all so much better if they started again with a tabla rasa, and fold all that experience into what became Plan 9.
There are occasionally retellings of the origin of Unix in the computer press, like that from Ars linked below, in a manner reminiscent of scared creation mythology. But Unix is not something ordained by God, and its creators knew that.
If Unix was the Genesis of modern computing (or the Unix way of doing things at least), Plan 9 should have been the New Testament!
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/unix-at-50-it-starts-with-a-mainframe-a-gator-and-three-dedicated-researchers/
Squizzler,
+1
I feel the same way about unix and plan 9.
The unix founders deserve loads of credit for what they did back in the day, but there’s no fundamental reason to hold that technology on a plateau. No disrespect intended, be we have a lot more experience and hindsight than they did. We shouldn’t treat old operating systems/standards/languages as dogma – we can do better. Once things get set in motion it’s really hard to change course though. The incumbents hold all the power and newcomers mostly get ignored.
Once a technology is “good enough”, there’s usually very little reason to drop support. You can see this everywhere in technology. TCP/IP, 802.11n WiFi, 10/100 ethernet, 2G mobile phones, UNIX, NT, 64bit x86, ARM64. All are technologies that are at least over a decade old, most over several decades old, and are still going strong. Technology has plateaued, because it gets to a point where it’s “good enough”, and because of that, technologies that should have died out decades ago carry on being implemented and supported. The big one that surprises me is the imminent shutdown of the UK POTS network. There’s a lot of gear that still relies on it, and it’s going to be a big ask to move all those devices to modern IoT solutions
The123king,
I agree with your point about “good enough”. However I do find some of your examples make the opposite case to what you are saying.
*) The ongoing use of TCP/IP (specifically on the original ipv4 stack) is hugely problematic because there’s not enough IPs. Workarounds are widely despised and dependency on CG NAT & killing off end to end addressing negatively affect connectivity. It’s hard to replace because so many of our networks are already built up around IPv4. Ironically poor countries that didn’t get to deployed IPv4 early on aren’t as encumbered by IPv4. They have IPv6 and ironically it’s the rich countries that are struggling to migrate.
*) 802.11n wifi still works ok especially if the spectrum isn’t too crowded, but many homes & businesses have already moved to newer standards with more bandwidth and capacity.
*) 10/100 ethernet Did you omit 1gbps on purpose? 1gbps has been the standard for decades and even that is starting to be displaced by 2.5gbps. Some of us are running 10gbe too.
*) 2G mobile phones. I don’t understand why you included this example. Most of us have been forced to throw away older phones as they no longer function today.
*) UNIX, NT I agree with you the world considers these good enough. For better or worse new operating systems cannot get a foothold.
*) 64bit x86, ARM64. I think users are more loyal to operating systems and software than hardware architectures. Of course given that so much software depends on specific architecture, that’s the deciding factor. I do agree with you about these being good enough, but I think that most users would be open to hardware alternatives if it weren’t for software compatibility issues.
When you say “technology has plateaued”, it gives me the impression that the technology cannot improve further, which I disagree with. Technology can & does improve! The question of whether it becomes popular is a completely different matter though.. I might call this more of an “acceptance plateau” than a “technology plateau”.
The same Bell Labs team realised they could do it all so much better than Plan 9, fold all that experience into what became Inferno, and rebooted the failed Alef experiement for Plan 9 as Limbo.
I’ve had some experience with HPUX, UnixWare, AIX, Solaris, CLIX (Intergraph), Tru64 Unix and probably more.
None of them felt easier to use or more integrated than mainstream Linux distros.
All of them had their own weird tools and their own weird ways to do stuff that should have been easy, their own great features or painful restrictions.
There’s no one true Unix and drawing some virtual line between Linux distros and other Unix-likes is totally ridiculous.
Yes, I’ve used most of those too (Except for CLIX) and others including AT&T and Ultrix, and non of them worked the same way for administration, disk layout, etc. All of which seems very like Linux of today and the many distro’s that are opinionated on tools and how they want to present themselves to the end user. While you could count on things like the shell, what you put into code was very different across vendors – AIX especially took this very far and used IBM specific terms for things that would confuse the hell out of someone from Ultrix or SunOS.
Well, several of the early Unix commands and other features were copied from Multics.
https://multicians.org/unix.html
I don’t get it. I did use those old Unix systems. While better than Dos in many ways, compared to a modern system I don’t understand the appeal. Its exactly like what I have today, but much much worse. I do have a soft spot for VAX systems, so maybe thats what Thom is feeling. Idk, their isn’t modern vax to really compare it to.
There is OpenVMS you can try
https://www.osnews.com/story/136001/openvms-9-2-for-x86-available-for-hobbyists/
Though not strictly VMS, NT owes a lot of it’s heritage to VMS, and can be somewhat considered a successor to it. Of course, that’s ignoring all the Windows cruft plastered on top, but deep down, Windows NT is pretty similar.
I’d love to see a fork of ReactOS that excels at what NT should have focussed on. A variety of subsystems targeting different operating system platforms. Running Haiku apps on an NT kernel would blow my mind.
Linux is vastly more user-friendly than proprietary Unix systems. In fact the GNU tools were popular to install on Unix systems (before Linux existed) precisely because Unix systems were so unfriendly.
Plus, people expect a LOT out of their Linux systems, today. Old Unix systems were tiny and feature-bare, not having 4 web browsers and 3 desktop environments installed. Maybe not even having networking, a max file system size too small to install all options of the base system. No package managers, needing to tune all manner of parameters in the kernel to suite your precise workload (and reboot).
You’re not going to convince me that needing to run “lanscan -v” on HP-UX is more logical than “ifconfig -a” that works most everywhere else.
Call me a noob (that’ll take some courage) but Slackware and Sid are enough for me and my workstation. My use of the CLI is limited to apt-get (not on Slackware obviously) and little else, and that’s a huge plus. Spending hours configuring a new Linux distro through the CLI is a waste of time when nowadays you can do it in minutes using the GUI.
There’s always macOS, true certified UNIX, if you can swallow the whole apple. I can’t — except when I had to finish a novel and macOS was invisible (the whole point of building an OS) and let me do my job with no fuss. With a little more patience (measurable in minutes) I can accomplish the same goals on Fedora, *Buntu, Mint, or Sid. So what’s the point? My 4th redundant backup (4×1 NAS, RAID 1) works on nothing but Linux (SMB 1, deprecated on everything else, which is of no importance to me since it’s on a LAN).
Is this becoming *BSDnews.com?
The article should be retitled: “Where Unix Commands Came From.” It doesn’t address the origin of the quasi-cryptic system directory structure or the boot process. The latter would be very interesting to compare to modern incarnations. I believe they had to toggle in a bootloader with switches. GRUB came much later, with GNU.
Note that booting is (for the most part) dependent on the platform, so there’s no lineage from V7’s boot and Linux’s. In fact, I don’t think modern Linux has anything in common with UNIX: The only things that match come from POSIX compatibility.
I agree with some of the previous comments. I’ve spent way too much work time on old Unix systems and I really don’t see any appeal or simplicity at all. They were all missing basic functionalities that were common place on any Linux distro. Please note that they could have all those things, but chose not to.
Linux based systems have simply evolved and modern tools and frameworks (including SystemD) have just made my life so much easier.
My first hands-on exposure to UNIX beyond the user level was in the mid-90s, when I was hired for a job I was not even close to being technically qualified for, but thanks to the logic of UNIX, I was able to figure it out. The employer was in a deep hole because its SGI admin team left all at once to join a startup, and they had a bunch of SGI IRIX machines, including multi-CPU servers, that had just arrived and needed to get set up.
The departing senior admin overlapped for three days with me, doing as much knowledge transfer as he could. When he left, I was on my own. Between my detailed notes, the man pages, SGI’s *excellent* documentation and support, a few O’Reilly books (I sure miss those), and, most importantly, the exercise of personally reading the text-based init scripts on multiple systems, I was able to take control of a complicated environment in a remarkably short time.
About a year later, I confided to a few colleagues that I had barely written my first shell script before getting the job, but no one believed me. It turned out that the staff thought I was a guru, but all I did was to take a careful, methodical approach to planning and documenting my configuration and change control, and I RTFM’d as if my life depended on it. I won’t pretend that UNIX is perfect or without its frustrations, but I came to appreciate the beauty of its approach. In some ways, those were the best days of my career.