Yet another Unix/History Web page

I've been a Unix user starting at the Cooper Union in 1978.
Thanks to Bob Hopkins, the Cooper Union Computer Center was an early adopter by running Unix version 6 on a DEC PDP11/45 hard wired to several ASR-33 teletypes and Olivetti teleprinters.

Many Cooper alumni are active with Unigroup: NYC's oldest Unix User group.
We remember The Unix Wars.
It wasn't just BSD vs. AT&T, it was AT&T, Sun & friends (the Archer Group, later known as Unix International)
vs. IBM, DEC, HP et al. (the Hamilton Group, later known as OSF: Open Software Foundation).
Here's a good article from October 1988 recalling the fighting and posturing:
18 AT&T supporters - now known as the Archer Group - made a public commitment to pure Unix System V.4. The 18 members - Amdahl Corp, Control Data Corp, Fujitsu Ltd, Gould Computer Systems Inc, ICL Ltd, Intel Corp, Motorola Corp, NCR Corp, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, Prime Computer Inc, Sun Microsystems Inc, Toshiba Corp and Unisys Corp on the hardware side, joined by software companies Human Computer Resources Ltd, Informix Software Inc, Lachman Associates Inc, Micro Focus Plc and Unisoft Corp - claim to account for around 75% of the Unix systems so far sold. And although AT&T itself is not strictly speaking a member of what is effectively the AT&T Unix fan club, it is re-enforcing the move by conceding some of the main points of contention that led to the original dissatisfaction of the Hamilton Group and directly on to the formation of the Open Software Foundation in the first place.



I consulted to AT&T IS (information systems) in the late 80s, culminating with assignments at the AT&T Summit Facility





These 9 slides dated 15-Jan-1987 by RAF (Roger Faulkner) are from his AT&T Summit Facility donut talk of truss(1),
the first debugger to use the shiny-new /proc(4) facility (now taken for granted in Linux systems).
It was much more powerful than these slides describe.
Mike Scheer extended RFS (remote file system) to support debugging of remote machines directly over the network without any additional daemons or remote processes.

Had I been an early adopter, I would've gotten a certificate of /proc-tology from RAF himself!

I think I used to have lunch with him at the cafeteria. The language group was the only table with laughter and fun conversations. Most days, someone saw a new movie and shared a review. It was a fun group to hang around.

Here's A brief history of /proc from Sun's perspective, by Eric Schrock.

The Pun's On You

The Unix name was a simplification of Multics, on which Unix was based.
Many Unix-like operating systems made fun of Unix, such as Mt Xinu (that's Unix TM backwars),
and Douglas Comer's Xinu (Xinu Is Not Unix).
*nix is the regular-expression to represent Unix and Unix-like systems.