Back in the Day: UNIX, Minix and Linux

Dave Taylor — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 12:00:00 +0000

Columnist Dave Taylor reminisces about the early days of UNIX and how Linux evolved and grew from that seed.

Twenty five years of Linux Journal. This also marks my 161st column with the magazine too, which means I've been a part of this publication for almost 14 years. Where does the time go?

In honor of the historical significance of this issue, I wanted to share some of my memories of the very early days of UNIX, Minix and Linux. If you're a regular reader of my column, you'll recall that I'm in the middle of developing a mail merge Bash utility, but that'll just have to wait until next time. I promise, the shell ain't going anywhere in the meantime!

Back in the Day

I first stepped foot on campus at UC San Diego in late 1980, a declared computer science major. At that point, a lot of our compsci program was based on UCSD Pascal on Apple II systems. I still have fond memories of floppy drives and those dorky, pixelated—but oh so fun!—Apple II games we'd play during lab time.

For more serious classes, however, we had some big iron—a mainframe with accounts and remote computer lab terminals set up in designated rooms. The operating system on those systems? UNIX—an early version of BSD UNIX is my guess. It had networking using a modem-to-modem connection called UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Protocol, or UUCP. If you wanted to send email to someone, you used addresses where it was:


unique-hostname ! unique-hostname ! account

I don't remember my UCSD email address, but some years later, I was part of the admin team on the major UUCP hub hplabs, and my email address was simply hplabs!taylor.

Somewhere along the way, networking leaped forward with TCP/IP (we had TCP/IP "Bake Offs" to test interoperability). Once we had many-to-many connectivity, it was clear that the "bang" notation was unusable and unnecessarily complicated. We didn't want to worry about routing, just destination. Enter the "@" sign. I became taylor@hplabs.com.

Meanwhile, UNIX kept growing, and the X Window System from MIT gained popularity as a UI layer atop the UNIX command line. In fact, X is a public domain implementation of the windowing system my colleagues and I first saw at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. PARC had computers where multiple programs were on the screen simultaneously in "windows", and there was a pointer device used to control them—so cool. Doug Englebart was inspired too; he went back to Stanford Research Institute and invented the mouse to make control of those windows easier. At Apple, they also saw what was being created at PARC and were inspired to create the Macintosh with all its windowing goodness.

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Why Linux Is Spelled Incorrectly

Bryan Lunduke — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 13:15:15 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

You ever see an injustice in the world—one so strong, so overwhelming—that, try as you might, you just can't ignore it? A crime that dominates your consciousness beyond all others? That drives you, even in the face of certain defeat, to action?

Mine is...Linux.

Not the existence of Linux. Linux is amazing. Linux powers the world. Linux is, as the kids say, totally tubular.

It's the name. It's the name that makes me Hulk out. Specifically, it's that confounded "X". It just plain should not be there.

Linux should be spelled L-I-N-U-C-S. Linucs.

Seriously.

That's not a joke.

To make my case for why I believe this, with every fiber of my being, let's start by understanding why "Linux" has that X in the first place. It happened back in the early 1990s, when the first snapshot of Linucs (ahem) code was first uploaded to an FTP server.

Back then, Linus Torvalds wanted to name his kernel "Freax" ("Free" + "Freak" + "Unix"). Linus felt naming the kernel after himself would be a bit, you know, weird. A friend of his disagreed, and when he uploaded the source, he named the folder "Linux".

See that "X" there at the end? It was meant to represent the "X" in UNIX. There's just one problem with that.

UNIX was never supposed to have an "X" in the name at all.

You see, "UNIX" originally was spelled U-N-I-C-S, which stands for UNiplexed Information and Computing Service. This was, itself, based off the name for an operating system made by some of the same folks—Multics (MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service).

(Note: neither Unics or Multics is spelled with an "X".)

The people that created, engineered and ran the project named it "Unics", and, here's the kicker, nobody is 100% sure where that X even came from. I cover the topic a bit further in my video "The Complete History of Linux (Abridged)" around the five-minute mark. But, the gist is this: the most viable, detailed theory for "the X" is that "maybe someone in PR did it?"

In other words, Linucs—possibly the most critical and valuable piece of software in human history—is incorrectly named "Linux" because an unknown person may or may not have accidentally written Unics as "UNIX" once. Maybe. We're not really sure.

But, because everyone else uses the X, so must I. In every article. Every video. Every presentation.

Whenever I write the word "Linux"—which is about 80 bajillion times every day—I let out a whisper-quiet, short, tortured scream, followed by a subtle wimper of defeated acceptance. If you've ever seen me at a conference, writing an article on my laptop, now you know why I look like a completely insane person.

It's that stupid, friggin' X.

So. There you have it.

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