Jon "maddog" Hall talks Unix and Linux history
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ต.ค. 2024
- Jon "maddog" Hall gives a brief history of the period of 1969 to 2019 with regard to 50 years of Unix and Internet advancement. Some of the high (and low) points of that period and its meaning to computer science of today. He calls for a celebration in the year 2019 of the women and men who made these advances possible. 2019 will be 50 years of Unix, 25 years of usable Linux, Linus Torvalds's 50 years old, 10 years since the start of the ideas to setup Linaro and more.
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This interview is GOLD for me.
Many people don't have a minimum idea about software history.
Hope somebody could make history book about software
and the people that make possible for the future.
Wow! I'm impressed with Jon's skills for story telling. I felt like I was reading a novel.
he, Stallman and linus should be assigned a Nobel prize for the influence on the humans race development...
mope worthy of peace prize than Obama.
@@Canadian789119 that isn't hard to achieve.
Richard Stallman, Definitely Yes.
Send the suggestion of the peace prize to Norwegian parliament that get nominate and then decide who get the peace prize. No, that one isn't decided in Stockholm.
Agreed.
It's a pleasure to listen to this man.
Maddog is awesome, but the guy who is doing the interview, it's awful, he barely can talk, and it's struggling to formulate even basics ideas on each question.
Love this guy. He was the author of Linux for Dummies for a few editions.
Excellent rundown of Unix history
Hahah! No better way to manipulate a socially awkward intellectual than with the strategic application of alcohol. :P
Omg... His memory of details and events is incredible... I don't even remember what I ate yesterday!
that's because you brain stores only important information that is interesting, the brain doesn't store memory like a computer.
@@ChristopherGray00 Yep absolutely right.
Yes, great person with great memory.....
“In corporations many things are not achieved by going through formal chanels, but by asking for reciprocal favors or friendship.” How thruthful!
31:47 when you meet Linus Torvalds about getting Linux running on the Alpha system, but he tells you he's going to use the power pc instead!!
I'm lop the hhhhhhhh
I transform into a crow. Obviously.
I was under the impression that Torvalds began work on the Linux kernel not in the hopes that it would be useful for GNU, but rather as a personal project to teach himself about kernel design. I did not realize that he was aware of the GNU project from the very beginning.
This is a really great and informative interview.
It was hard _not_ to be aware of GNU back then, because their tools were often better than what was shipped with commercial UNIX variants, and it was Free Software. GNU was the obvious choice for the application layer.
Because of AT&T's legal monopoly on telephone service at the time, AT&T was also not allowed to sell computer products as such, which is one reason why UNIX was released free for educational purposes.
Actually Unix was not really free for educational purposes. It was *very* low price (a few hundred dollars) for a site wide source code (the only way it was distributed at the time).
Unfortunately if you were not a *research* university (Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, etc) the price was tens of thousands of dollars per CPU.
I know that, because I tried to buy it for my small two-year technical college.
The Holy Trinity... Maddog, Stallman, Torvalds.
Naah man. The Holy Trinity is Thompson, Ritchie and Kernighan.
@@FranciscoMNeto I think there is a whole bunch of holy people who got funded in one or another way and now we got where we are.
What about Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan - "The three Wise men"? Don't forget about them!!
2 yr. old thread......oh well.....still
Yeah, and Stallman is only a clown! He have made him self a clown. His only trying to get glory to himself, from anything.
Stallman is a gifted programmer and a complete f*cktard
"Send (the alpha computer) to Finland right away ..." ... a Finn here :)
Man , Maddog i remember this guy from some old linux online forums, wow this guy is really amazing, sharp mind.
Probably the thing that most people noticed first about Berkeley Unix vs. Bell sysV was the BSD had job control (CTRL-Z to suspend a running job, fg, bg, etc.) Previously, in UNIX if you launched a program without &, you were stuck and had to wait for it to complete, sit on your thumbs until it was finished. Not many people paid the $160k for UNIX (is this even true?) but many universities took a sourcecode campuswide site-license for $20,000(~7 cars) for UNIX.
I wonder when they invented the program screen. I could probably look that up. But why would I? You facts are more interesting :)
PS. had to look it up. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Screen#History
Another giant is interviewed ... Great
Stallman didn't write the kernel because he couldn't. It took him decades to finally complete a GNU kernel (HURD). It's still not really a viable product. Part of the reason for this is that Stallman stubbornly failed to follow the wise advice of Linus Torvalds regarding how to build a kernel.
@Newtube rms is a gifted programmer, but a complete and utter f*cktard.
31:46 cracks me up every time😂😆
He didn’t say much about free BSD.
Peter Paul Chato When Apple makes an OS that requires T2 chip will you drop your silly hackintoshing and join the Linux community?
;)
@@jjwachter82 Prophet John, is that you?
I remember when I was a kid in the early 80's My dad worked for AT&T and had an AT&T 6300 PC that ran UNIX and MS-DOS. MS-DOS stuck long-term because it had games...lol But I remember him teaching me UNIX and DOS. I think somewhere in his basement we may still have the orange and gray books on both UNIX and MS-DOS.
They were good days. I was born in the eighties, but in my country I did not have a computer. I entered these interviews to see the people who owned at that time and their impression of the regime.
I would abolish patent and copyright laws. The Chinese pretty much ignore them which is why everything you own was made there.
"You need performance and you don't do that with Java. I'm sorry" lol
One of the reasons early computer science departments liked Unix was that they could buy their own PDP11 or VAX computers to use without accounting software.
Before the 1980's the computer at Rice was a room-sized IBM-clone owned by the University and used by the administration to run the school. The math and science departments had to "buy" computer time from the University for their students.
If a student made a mistake (such as an infinite loop), an entire semester's budget could be spent in one day.
When I started as a freshman at Rice, I was a "mathematical sciences" major, but by 1981 they had a real "computer science" degree. It's hard to understand today just how liberating Unix was in 1980 by allowing students and researchers to play with the computer without having to worrying about an accounting bill.
Fork off .. And die was and is reality ;) unix is and was.. The centre of my universe.. Cool video charbax , can you hear he doesn't talk down to you.. or sales or any other kind of.. Product.. It's all about potential.
I love in the whole open source community, that you can share your knowledge for free. And even technical books are quite cheap. This is one rease why I love Linux. Linus did not "hold back" his knowledge.
Fascinating. Worked with the Alpha running Unidata under DG-UX, had the "Live free or die - UNIX" numberplate. There was a version of Windows (NT?) that ran on the Alpha, I wonder how many people actually used it? IIRC there were several ex Digital people involved in the creation on Windows NT.
I think the machine named perch at our university was an Alpha. It was definitely risc. But I was younger and didn't know asmuch back then.
Very illuminating history! Thank you Mr. Jon. I am a DEC VAX11/780 , VMS fan. Like Mr. Linus and own a pi 400. It was like he was telling my thoughts and telling me things that I didn't know! 🙏🙏🙏
Great history. Terry Davis applied many of these principles in the development of TempleOS, and I'm convinced it is a revolutionary new tech.
Wow, it has taken my five years to find out about this youtube video. I first met "Maddog" when I was Ultrix SIG Chair for DECUS Europe in 1989. That is also when I met Kurt Reisler my USA counterpart. The European DECUS was in places like Den Hague and Cannes. By 1994 my term as SIG chair had ended but I went to the DECUS conf in New Orleans. Great memories !
On the UNIX side: In the 80s I worked for Imperial College Computer Center and we got one of those university copies of Unix source. At the time I had just written a C compiler for the CDC6500 and could also cross compile for the 8086. So I got Unix running on an iSBC86-12 Multibus system around about the time IBM PCs started.
Ncomputing was doing FPGA triple headed graphics cards back around 2009 too, for thin client applications, thought that was cool.
Linus has told me that he would not start a kernel project today. Instead he would learn how to program an FPGA.
Very clear explanations of these key events. Thanks for sharing this.
This conversation covered Unix to Linux history in depth. But I was surprised that the C programming language was mentioned little or not at all. My understanding was that Unix's development demanded the creation of C almost from the beginning and that Ritchie and Thompson were deeply involved in both.
I think C on all over this superb "novel" was like tomatoes on pizza, so he forgot to mention it
How the fu** did this get even a single dislike? Much less 2? Insanity...
Why isn’t this taught in schools?!?
I have a photo with him. An honor to me
I wish engineers would learn computer history as default. So many of those questions would be already well knwon, and this interview could have so much more interesting technical questions answered! This guy has so much to teach and that is omitted in this video...
18:40 seconds in. Qualifications & course-work do not exist for true innovations. Jon does not mention that most of the innovations lead to failure & eventual disappearance. "History is the propaganda of the winners".
IBM etc know that corporate culture empowers beta persons, and kills the alpha persons (usually undergraduates, students & apprentices). Ubuntu is a fork of Debian. Mint Linux is a fork of Ubuntu. Other operating systems are forks of Mint Linux.
Similarly with GNOME. GNOME(3) is so unpopular, that MATE & Cinnamon desktop environments were created instead. Other Desktop Environments are trying to also trying to not die, as usual. That is the joy of genuine open source. Eventually the closed source stuff will disappear?
At DEC there were often two or three closed-source projects to do the same thing. Two would be killed off, and people never saw the IP they generated.
Loved this video, I got into Linux in 2018 with my Linux Mint, I came from windows haven't looked back since. Thanks for sharing.
31:47 aaaah
Hey, Jon, are you still around? I'm still around, still running Linux! :)
Can't we just keep these guys stay alive on earth By using some sort of potion. Ahh! It's so imotional
Red Hat For Dummies was my first book on Linux, before you could just get everything off the internet.
Ran down to WHSmith to grab that, and didn't even have a PC to use the CD that came with it, just read cover to cover for a year. Dude still a legend to me.
I am glad you liked LFD.
I've developed on the mainframe, Unix/Linux and OpenVMS. Unix/Linux is great at interacting with a few people, but *stinks* at batch processing, and even more horrible at interacting with thousands of people.
Back in the 90s, a DEC Alpha was as cool as it was unobtainable for a poor HS/college student. It was always a disappointment how the mighty Unix Workstations had their lunch eaten by the lame but obtainable Intel PC.
@Charbax The Title should be: Jon "maddog" Hall talks Unix and GNU/Linux history.
I really want to spend an afternoon with this guy listening him talk about unix history
Wow, this guy is crazy interesting! I could listen to him all day. Such a great interview!!!
Total respect for you, sir. Thanks for sharing this knowledge.
Hurricanes 😂🍸
He doesn’t have it quite right. Bob Marsh negotiated the first contract with AT&T when he was with Onyx. At that time there was a young gentleman running manufacturing at Onyx by the name of Scott McNealy.
There were many people trying to negotiate licenses with AT&T about that time. I think you might admit that Sun was a bit more successful.
@@penguinnh I am just trying to set the record straight. Bob Marsh and Kip Myers’ influence in those days is underrated.
I wonder what Jon "maddog" Hall now thinks about Richard Stallman. And AI, and Machine Learning, and Quantum computing.
I have been hearing that "AI is almost here" for the past fifty years, but I have a relatively large expectation of "real AI".
Quantum computers? I am glad I am retiring.
The operating system called "eunuchs"
Is the person with the camera on a boat? Stay still ffs.
Great job, Charbax! Thoroughly enjoyed watching and learning!
22:55 nice explanation of the importance of open source
I like it when he said “ I dropped my drink” .
This is crazy interesting.
31:46 the true maddog manifesting for a brief moment
In 1989 I asked a dean what should I do in college he said computers are going to soon burst onto the landscape you should take as much of it as you can. I liked this history it tells alot about the people in it I first got Collderia Linux in a box tried it out it was mostly broken didn't work well at all then PCGamer gave away free Linux cd's I grabbed it that was the first real working Linux I got I run Solus Linux and Linux Mint Solus is new and keeps a more updated Kernel and run a bit faster great video
The dollar cost comparison does not work. Inflation, incomes vary too much. How many Big Macs? This might be better?
Great video on the History of Unix / Linux... Im using Openindiana OS which is Open Solaris based on System V Unix
I love the way John ignores the interviewer and just ploughs on telling his story. Like the future stuff as well...
WTF agenda of this young interviewer who has to mention ARM at every turn? As if it wasn't the young-punk-newcomer that has had little to do with the big picture history at least until very lately. I was there when Jon was (incl at DEC) - and have a few arms around the place, they're nice, but gee...they're not the end-all be-all around this place by FAR. Just a cute little latecomer just breaking out of toy status. Jon's being pretty diplomatic in pointing this out peripherally.
My website is called ARMdevices.net and we are doing this Interview at the prime Linux on ARM Linaro conference. And there are more than 25-30 Billion ARM processors shipped every year. Sorry for mentioning it!
Hello Doug! Nice to hear from you again!
This video is a gem
"and I never drop a drink"
What a computer science lesson!!!
13:17 I just checked Wikipedia, and it says the Hurd kernel has been under development since 1990, which actually predates Linux. So the idea that Stallman was holding off on the kernel in order to concentrate on userland seems wrong. The main obstacle seems to be his insistence on making it a microkernel architecture. That sacrifices performance. It is supposed to give you increased reliability in return, but the fact that he has found it so hard to get it to production quality seems to belie that claim. In the meantime, “monolithic” Linux has gone from nothing at all to production quality across about two dozen different major processor architectures.
The discussion of micro kernels vs modern monolithic kernels (with loadable device drivers and loadable kernel modules) is a long discussion over many beers.
That was a pleasure, thanks
Dude was like Ginger Baker, back when he was younger ;-)
R.I.P. Dennis Ritchie
51 minutes. BIG-LITTLE deficits shows the current poor multi tasking of Linux. CISC (Microsoft) does this much better,it seems. On the desktop, can Linux catch up & overtake Microsoft, one day?
Not sure how you can compare Linux on BIT-LITTLE to Microsoft on CISC. BIG-LITTLE is a hardware architecture design that had never existed before. It was the choice of the hardware vendors to create this. An innovation, if you will. So of course nobody has been able to make a good working OS for that model yet. It was also the choice of the hardware manufactures to try and make Linux work well on it. Linux runs very well on CISC. I assume when CISC ( Microsoft) you meant Windows on Intel & AMD ? You do know Windows also works on RISC computers like ARM ? Just like Linux, right ? Did you know some people from Microsoft also develop on Linux (mostly drivers) ?
As has been the case for many. many years, the biggest reason for the dominant position of Windows as the desktop is the usual catch-22: you need applications to be available otherwise people won't use it, but if there are no applications available, it's less likely for people to put in the time/work to make a usable desktop. It's hard to break through this barrier. But websites/webapps helped a lot. And Linux is already the most used for smartphones (for example Android).
Awesome video Charbax! long time no see! was hoping to see Maddog in this year's Fosdem but didn't make it?
THAT - the compiler story . . in some time.. the compiler was a barrier..
Great man, interesting video - definitely work the 'like'.....
I couldn't finish this video because of the movement.
Still can't believe I've actually met him personally
Somebody should tell him to clean his glasses :')
I appreciate his TIME for the interview.
i didn't know daniel dennett knew computer history
There are so many interesting facets in the history and evolution of, well of everything we see and do today in a digital setting.
impressive!
Wow! What an incredible man
Press 31:45 to wake up
*nix
Use FreeBSD
Interesting tidbit: Microsoft ported WinNT to the Alpha too, a pure 64bit Windows, and then dropped it when the Alpha was not commercially successful. The whole "Oh No, will 64bit Windows work?" horror 5 years later with the AMD-64 chips was smoke and mirrors. It had been done, and worked fine.
Microsoft was first to have x86 Unix Xenix which later was sold to SCO
Try as I might, I could not get Solaris-86 to install. When I gave up on that I installed Linux. The only hard parts were audio driver and the Xfree86 modline. Once those were figured out, it was rock solid stable. I thank Mark Knopper for pioneering device autodetection.
This is long so skip.
Coherant & SCO cost too much and BSDI were battling AT&T. I really wanted to make my PC in 1992 access memory like old Atari ST did. My Atari at home with no issue could see 4MB of memory. Here I was station in Okinawa had saved up for year to get PC 8MB of memory, on the PC I had to use QEMM-386, HighMem.sys to see the 8MB of memory in the IBM PC with dos and Windows 3.x. I had Mark William C compliers and Basic on the Atari , no such luck with the PC, I bought Borland Turbo C. Then I head about Linux, download Slackware did my floppies. Had linux up and running all the tools I need plus a complier for free and learn everything i could about monitor and had X windows ruing, sound compiled Kernel.
No basic but Perl filled that void. Atari ST Basic (GFA BASIC much better)allowed for making windows and you could do the same with TC/TK. At work I had SYStem V, Xenix and Solaris. A little more work and got LPD working and printed out Zen and the Art of the internet. Unix System V user's guide Then into 1993 The Linux Document Project was under way and you Had the Linux System Admin Guide, Network Admin and the How to. The LDP made the phrase Read the Fine Manual Nice. Then if you had to buy a book it Was O'Reilly. In very strange way I got into Linux because I could do much more things with my Old AtariST ,MegaST and Amiga computers than with the IBM PC made years later. it was Linux that made the IBM PC clone into a true Personal Computer .
@Curt Howland: Microsoft ported Windows NT 3.x to the DEC Alpha, but it was NOT 64-bit, is was 32-bit. They intended to develop Windows NT 64-bit, but the project was scrapped. They also had a 32-bit port of Windows NT to the 64-bit MIPS R4xxx chip and a 32-bit port to the PowerPC.
When the 64-bit PowerPC came out, Microsoft had already dropped all other ports beside the Intel 32-bit one.
The next time Microsoft started going 64-bit, was in 2003 with the Intel Itanium chip (IA-64) and later in 2005 with the AMD X86_64 and Intel's x64.
@@bwzes03 I believe that the first 64-,bit address space Windows system was VISTA.
Always good to hear from these guys talking about how it was when one person could make a difference. And except for Torvalds, none of them really made tons of money for their contributions.
I do not know about Linus' finances (nor do I want to know), but I can almost guarantee that Bill Gates has more money.
Feels so humbling to sit and listen to this guy
at 23:36 the interviewer asks Maddog what was his the first impression upon meeting Torvalds for the first time, and Maddog just answers absolutely phased out stuff
Amazing, He is truly the Legend!
I really enjoyed this, thank you!
thanks for sharing this amazing interview.
Interesting he didn't mention minix in the whole story.
> The more functionality you put in the kernel, the more likely there's going to be some kind of mistake.
What's the Linux kernel now? Like two milion lines?
Most of it is drivers.
More like 20 million lines
The kernel is complex for many reasons, but you can get an idea of "shoving functionality out of the kernel" by looking at the number of system calls vs the number of APIs in the libraries. What if all the library functionality was moved into the kernel.
Why haven't people received the super Nobel prize for Linux? They literally have rise to the internet as we know it
Dennis Ritchie died the same week as Steve Jobs. Steve created a multi-million dollar company. Dennis helped create a multi-trillion dollar industry.
Which of the 5 nobel fields would have Linux fall under? Because I think it's "none of them".
31:46
32:41 why did the video get cut?
it turns out that the battery runs out
*bows in sheer admiration*
Amazing stories!
I really enjoyed this
Very interesting.