Unix vs Linux
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Unix was started by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and some other engineers including Brian Kernighan back in the early 1970s. It has a long and illustrious history. But then Linux came along and things changed. How is Linux different to Unix? Are they the same thing? Please, let me explain!
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“Daddy, what are clouds made of?” , “Mostly Linux servers, son”
this is amazing..
OMG you made my day! 😄
Thanks to IBM for that. They are all running Redhat
holy shit thats a good one :D
We'll eventually get to know that human body runs on Linux kernel as well xd.
Dennis Ritchie died the next week after Steve Jobs and so his death news got overshadowed by Media's frenzy coverage of Steve Jobs, didn't hear single mention or article about Ritchie at that time. He left unbeknown to the world but perhaps only the real followers (C programmers and Unix fans) mourned and shed tears on that day.
believe me no one give 2 fucks about steve jobs ! i dont mean in a rude way ! The contribution of dennis ritchie is simiply no match ! steve jobs was a marketing genius
Doesnt matter what you stand for, aslong as youre popular people are gonna like you. People are awesome.
@@satadhi Millions give a fuck about Steve Jobs. Don't be an ass.
@@will_it_work No. Millions are reacting emotionally to the passing of a celebrity cult leader in the case of Steve Jobs. Not the same thing.
K&R are Gods to me. T also. And a few others. Jobs was a marketing guy. The MacroSloth guy? A punk. I don't even like to say his name. Gary Kildall has my respect also. Too bad he drank. Roberts. Another God. Some others including Stallman and Wall. Let's put Linus in there too. Why not. I know you all have your own Gods too. I'm not disrespecting them; I just don't pretend to know as much about them. Cheers to all the old timers.
I was working at Bell Labs in 1977. Our project RSS, was one of, if not the first commercial product to use Unix. They gave me a unix and C manual on 8.5 x 11 paper to learn the language and OS. I believe at the time, there were just 3 UNIX computers in the world. I knew them as Holmdel red, white and blue. I used a C cross compiler that team had written for us so we could write C for the Bell Labs Mac8 which we used. All the tools ran on their UNIX computers while they finished re-writing UNIX in C. I eventually received a first edition C manual. I still have it. That was a long time ago.
ur old
@@SobekStreams silence, filth. You're in the presence of greatness.
@@resle I got ratioed :(
@@SobekStreams 🫂
Damn, irl, I would have never gotten a chance to interact with such a person. Internet is really something
I've been programming on Unix and Unix-like systems for almost 40 years, and I still learned things I didn't know. Nice job, Gary.
I'm in the 30+ club, and found the vid interesting too.
It's amazing how so many smart people came together at the beginning to create something that'd last so long.
I read that 60+ % of adults on planet EARTH have a unix device in their front pocket.
same here. I always told and tell my students that I drunk Unix with the breastmilk of my mom.
Old timer here also. Wrote first code in 1974. Can’t remember a day since that I wasn’t in front of a keyboard somewhere. Ex-Dec systems engineer, UNIX in banking, ULTRIX, A/UX, then fell in love with Mac. And now here I am again, laying on my back, using effectively a BSD based iPad to watch this video. Need to go charge my BSD based phone, and BSD based Mac. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Well Joe, glad never used any of your software/
@@godslayer1415 Wow. I'm glad I don't work with you because I believe that we should always be learning and be willing to admit it.
"just a hobby, won't be big and professional"
Little did Linus Torvalds know, his creation will run the world
No, Linus Torvalds had no idea. I recall reading an early interview where he said that the only reason that he did this was that he was too cheap to pay for a legal copy of Microsoft Windows, knowing that he could not take Minux on his computer after he left school. All he wrote was the kernel, what most people "see" as being Linux are actually the GNU tools. The GNU organization made all those tools available for free, as open source, which Linus used but conveniently neglected to admit for decades that GNU is what we were really using. He in all honestly should have named the operating system GNU-Linux, so that everyone knew that he just made the (small) kernel and not think that he invented a complete operating system (which he never has done).
Linus developed the kernel using GNU tools and named it Freax, not Linux. A system administrator friend of his that put his code on the Internet made the change from Freax to Linux. Linus has used different distributions over the years that packaged the Linux kernel with the GNU toolset and various other programs. Linus has NEVER worked on a Linux operating system, only the kernel. If you are going to be picky about GNU-Linux vs Linux, then get your facts straight, and put the blame with the OS distributors that failed to mention that it was the GNU operating system running on the Linux kernel, along with various applications, that underpinned their distributions.
Not freenix, but Freax.
I stand corrected. Faulty memory or I saw it spelled that way somewhere years ago. Corrected to freax.
+Billy Bob As I remember it, _UNIX_ was the os he wanted but was too cheap (or simply too poor) to buy a legal version of and he had no interest whatsoever in using Windows (which was little more than a GUI for DOS back then), and that's why he created his own version of UNIX.
I’ve worked in the IT industry for 20 years and nobody has explained UNIX like you have! Thank you!
Work with Unix everyday. Thanks RPMS and Sun systems.
@@hamu_sando It has been called "K&R C" or "K and R C". Not sure when that came into use, whether in the 80s or 90s.
Well then obviously you haven’t listened to this explanation... th-cam.com/video/dFUlAQZB9Ng/w-d-xo.html
@@devitomichael LOL
I talk about unix and linux etc to other IT people and you can see there eyes glaze over, all they know how to do is to buy what HP and dell tell them to buy and install windows server.
GNU: GNU's Not Unix
Linux: Linux Is Not Unix
Unix: Everybody hates me...
A mix of no one wants me for free and if I'm super expensive people will pay for it!
Linux doesn't stand for that...
Linux was a spin-off of the creator’s name Linus. Would be funny if it meant that though
Made me laugh 👍😂
Unix is the original, the real McCoy- we could never hate you!
The main difference is that Unix was too expensive for Linus Torvalds (a starving student at the University of Helsinki), so he made an operating system he could afford.
Minix*
المهاجر التونسي Unix is just old, it's not comparable to something like linz
No..no..no..no...no... you wrong !
IIRC the university used SPARC machines, and Linus couldn't afford Solaris on SPARC, so he made something that could run on his '386 machine. There was a version of Minix that could run on 8086 hardware; I used it on an old AT&T machine that I got for free.
@@StringerNews1 He had a lot of experience with Unix and all he had was a 386 machine so he wrote Linux as a sort of Minix clone, and later asked his fellow students and teachers about where to differ from Minix.
As someone who started his career as a developer at Bell Labs in the 80's using System V, I think this video is a great resource for younger developers who have no idea how all the Linux distros came about. Well done!
Well the short answer is Linus Tarvolds. He created a solid Linux kernel anyone can build on. Removing the need of big corporation resources and licensing.
That's awesome! My grandmother was just a desk worker at Ma Bell, but the politics, economics, and logistics of their hardware, software, and infrastructure are crazy. I can't believe so much of the modern world was based around a few dozen minds working tinkering away on new ideas.
All you other old timers are sharing your experiences so here's mine. I enjoyed working on some of the first digital flight computers used by the USAF in 1969. I went to work for a Bell company in 1970 and began taking night classes in 1979-80 learning programming. In the split in 1984, I went with AT&T and enjoyed talking to the guys being trained in the UNIX OS so they could sell and maintain AT&T minicomputers. I went back with Bell, was promoted to system specialist, and began maintaining software and datacom for 66 UNIX minicomputers.
Each of these machines used a different version. One used BSD, others used versions 3 or 4 of the original AT&T UNIX. This began to changed when Sys V r 4 was released. It was installed on an AT&T 3B20 we used for tape inventory. Since we had full root access to the machine we began using it to write shell scripts. I was never very good with compiled programming but I really enjoyed writing scripts because I could include loops, file creation, and so on.
I am also an amateur genealogist. In my off-time at work I wrote my first two books entirely using the 'vi' text editor. What a hoot! I had to format every line, create margins manually, add page numbers manually, and include a 'form-feed' character for pagination. In one of the books I wrote a brief program using AWK that created an index for me. After writing your first few thousand lines, you kind of get attached to the software. I'd still use 'vi' if I knew where I could get a decent copy that runs on Windows 11.
As info, the big joke of earliest versions of UNIX was there was no warning when doing a recursive remove. You could login as 'root', change directories to the root directory and do a recursive remove command 'rm -r' and the system wouldn't even burp. There was no "Are You SURE?' warning, nothing at all. The system assumed you knew what you were doing so it would immediately proceed to wipe out the entire disk. I actually knew a guy who did that once, LOL. He spent the next several hours reloading the OS then backup tapes to bring the system back up to date.
@@user-fr5sm1fb4o Hello, I hope the "first people to work on the foundation" answer your question. I was never employed by Bell Labs. I only worked for BellSouth and AT&T in Alabama. The labs are elsewhere. Our Alabama operations did have an R&D building, though, where our scientist wrote software for large Telco central office switches. These are the types equipment that are handling the backbone of the internet today.
For me, the technology began when I was in the U.S. Air Force working on Nuclear aircraft from '67 to '69. Back then all the electronics were top-secret and not discussed. The same tech we had back then is now in every smart phone. It was just a LOT bigger in the 1960s and mostly driven by analog computers rather than digital.
When we began installing some of the first digital computers in aircraft in 1969, there was no programming. Everything was hardwired. For maintenance, all we did was run tests and replace cards. If you're interested in tech that far back, talk to one of the guys from NASA. Their computers were programmable.
In the early 90s, computer magazines used to bear headlines like “Is Unix Dead?”, saying it was an old fashioned OS soon to be replaced by Windows NT.
Today Windows is an island surrounded by different forms of Unix running on all kinds of machines, from embedded systems to smartphones to Macs/PCs to blade servers to mainframes, and even Microsoft is adding a Linux kernel to it.
The ultimate evidence of the genius and elegance behind Unix concepts.
A nice complement to this video would be explaining them, showing what makes an OS a Unix, regardless of the source code, weather it is System V, BSD, Solaris, Irix, HPUX, NextOS, AIX, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android.
Dont forget Amiga, WarpOS, Atari ST, etc...
cp/m was still a thing
@@matekochkoch Yes, but I view it more as a predecessor to DOS, not in the chain of Unix development. Is that what you think? or something else?
@@josephgaviota you are right.
Not really. You are confusing "Unix OS", "Unix kernel" and "Unix concepts". Core concepts in Unix, in particular modular application design, are largely gone regardless of the merits. Unix and unix-like kernels are prominent but the ideas they contain are not unique even as compared to Windows which you are denigrating.
Linux is successful because corporations rallied around it as a less expensive alternative to full internal OS development. Had AT&T not engaged BSD in lawsuits it would have been BSD instead of Linux today. Furthermore, Unix userland is largely dead and what the kernel is doesn't really matter.
I would sure love to be the one profiting from the Windows "island". The odds are really stacked against them!
I do see parallels - I was a Unix SRV-5 admin and user in 1986 -87, and today I write this on a Linux Mint desktop. In between I used MS-DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows / Office in a Technical Writing situation, and lived through many broken promises for what the software would / could do. My Linux Mint desktop is a direct result of Windows 10, as I would not live with the direction Microsoft choose to go. You bring back memories with a truly excellent talk.
Jurassic Park was run on a Unix system.
I so laughed and called "bullshit" under my breath when I saw that scene in the theater... ;-P
Igor Schmidlapp Another computer running the 'Hollywood OS'!
Jurrasic Park is an unrealistic peice of shit compared to Ecco the Dolphin
Adam Lockington yup
@Stephen Hill The gui they showed her using is a real program that existed on IRIX workstations.
As a Linux Mint desktop user, and casual PC builder I found this video very informative. While this isn't the first time I've been exposed to some of this information I really liked the way you summed it all up, and put it in an easy to follow timeline. Thanks for a great video.
This is a great explanation. The depth you went into on the history really made everything very clear. Thank you.
I was a young engineer using commercial versions of Unix in the 1980s - running them on Silicon Graphics and Sun workstations. That was a great learning experience and we were developing engineering software running on these. Interesting to learn the background on UNIX.
ROTFL - Just though of that. Gary - There's another little bit of trivia for you. Do you know why Tux the Penguin is the mascot of Linux? Because in about '94 Linus Torvolds came to Australia, on holiday, and he went to Philip Island, near Melbourne, where the MotoGP race circuit is. They have pengiuns there, wild ones. So Linus met a penguin, and picked it up because it was cute, and the penguin bit him, because it was a wild animal. So Linus thought "That's cute. But he's a fiesty little thing." So shortly after that he was asked if Linux had a mascot, and what the mascot was and why, and after thinking for a moment, he remembered the penguin, who was cute but feisty...
There's another bit of trivia for you. Linus got the use of a version control system, to collaborate with other coders, and that had people from several countries, but a couple were Australian. So then Linus learned that system had a back-door in it, so the people who made it could at least look at all the secret code in the system. He found this out at about 2pm on a Friday, and had a tantrum, swore, threw stuff, went home early. As soon as he got home he sat down at his own computer and started to code a software collabotation suite, for his own use and for the Linux project. By Monday morning, he had a working example, which he took to work and showed people. It was more like a working prototype than a program ready for prime-time, but he got a couple of his best coders to drop what they were doing and start enhancing and debugging and improving his rough copy, and by the end of the week, 7 days after he started, Linus's own version control system went live and became the standard system for Linux, from that day until this. The program he wrote during a 36 hour temper tantrum, is called git.
Your explanation of GIT's origin is flawed as *$%^. The short version is at that he needed a replacement for bitkeeper, a commercial product that they were allowed to use for the linux kernel development. And Git was developed as a replacement for that product. Here is Linus himself explaining Git th-cam.com/video/4XpnKHJAok8/w-d-xo.html
mrcturor - there are at least 5 or 6 slightly different versions of the story, and I know of at least three Linus has told himself, which leave bits out. I know they had the use of bitkeeper, a commercial product, which they had permission to use for free, but at some stage Linus discovered there was a way for the coders of bitkeeper, to log in with a master key and access / copy anything, and they had been peeping at some of the developing code for the kernel. Apparently that had history, as in they'd discussed this once before, and the bitkeeper people had sworn to Linus that they didn't have it and there was nothing like that in it. So about lunchtime one Friday, Linus stumbled over categorical proof they were lying to him, and he had a tantrum and went home early, and sat down at his home desktop and started to code. I know that's not the version Linus usually tells.... The original first coder of git, was the original first coder of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvolds.
This story simply doesn't make sense. This doesn't correspond with al the mails/flames that I saw passing by on the mailinglist at the time. The main problem was that Tridgell reverse engineered the bitkeeper protocol which Larry thought of as a breach of license. Also it makes no sense to start juggling with things like access/copy anything as a reason to get upset. May I remind you that the kernel is GPL'ed just to allow all to copy/access to the source code. It is all in the open so that doesn't even make sense as valid reason. A few years before there was an attempt to sneak a backdoor into the kernel using the CVS repo that was used in parallel with bitkeeper, but it was discovered because that (linux source) code wasn't in bitkeeper. It feels like someone has been mingling these stories.
PS: You made a typo, it is Linus Torvalds ;-)
mrcturbo - sorry, is it a good time to make a joke about my spilling? Possibly not.... :-0
I concede you're better informed about this than I am. It was a long time ago and I'm trying to remember. Maybe it wasn't copying or editing, but it was something about the access & control that the bitkeeper people had, and the subject had come up at least once, and they'd told Linus one story, then a few weeks later something showed up which indicated with almost complete certainty, that they'd lied to him. There was something about what they could and couldn't do, inside his kernel project, and they told him one thing and it turned out that was a lie. I'm not entirely clear on what it was. But it did make him very upset, and he went home early on a Friday afternoon and had a working prototype, a proof of concept, of git, to show his people first thing Monday morning. I'm not completely sure what his issue with bitkeeper staff was, but it involved access and control and a password and what they could and could not do in his project, what they had access to. And it wasn't a fresh issue, it was something that had already come up once.
Hey, it's all the Microsloth dark side now... ;-P
It is such a complete breath of fresh air to listen to somebody who really knows what they're talking about and has been there, done that, and probably has a collection of t-shirts to go with it.
I loved how simply you explained this complex topic! Learned alot! Subscribe
Thank you Garry for refreshing our memories of these great operating systems. Even today, the whole world still stand on the shoulders of those legends you mentioned, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds etc. I could not imagine where the software world would be today with out free software philosophy of Richard Stallman.
Hi Gary. This is the first video I've watched on your channel and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Hat off to you mate, for compressing all of the content into 14 mins - not an easy task.
This brought back a hell of a lot of nostalgic memories. Thanks man! :)
That's one of the - if not _the_ - best summary and explanation in a few couple of minutes of the Unix and Linux situation I ever saw. Thanks for this great video!
Thank you Gary for taking the time to make this. A thumbs up 👍
oh my, gary, this was well explained. I have no idea why YT recommended this video to me (well I know all of this) but I stayed until the end and still am happy.
One of the best bite-sized explanations out there, well done Sir.
One of the best, concise overviews I've ever seen in 25 years. Outstanding!
You have just reminded me why I have grey hair. I lived pretty much this whole history from a user perspective. Was a great time in learning and growing a career in UNIX, BSD, Linux and many variants. Excellent history lesson and trip down re-sparking the grey matter about what I remember of those great days.
Took me all the way until the end of the video to realize that he's wearing a Red Hat red hat
I did not realize that until I read your comment. :v
Not a mayk 'Murika grate agane hat, thank god!
That backgammon example was badass. Kudos for the vid
*GARY!!!*
*Afternoon Professor!!!*
Keep them coming ... I'm gonna keep watching and learning!
MARK!!!
@Gary Explains, great video but can you clarify this for me? Someone said that the difference between Unix and Linux was that the former was essentially a command line interface and the latter a graphical user interface is this true? Anyways thanks in advance!
Battosai Jenkins Linux is as far as a GUI as it can get. Linux is used is "essentially" running the world's servers without any type of GUI
Battosai Jenkins The original UNIX does not pretty much exist these days
Omar Hatem Elrefaei , I have a System V on my Ancient Amiga 2000 system. Oh because of copyright reasons, it is called AMIX 😊
Thank you Gary for the history insight of "Unix vs Linux" .. very well presented, super comments as well .. cheers ..!!
thats pure information .he is so good in explaining things . he is not like rookie so called tech shows . i would called this real tech shows . thanks for such a nice explain
these kinds of videos of the history of programming languages and computers are phenominal, thanks for making them!
You might add that IBM-AIX is another UNIX “cousin” coming from the Bell Labs kernel and that Bell Labs also wrote a UNIX kernel to run on the Amdahl mainframe called UTS - an amazing combination - which was used for years to run the 1-800 network.
AIX on RS6000 (RISC arch). We had one of the very first prepro RS6000s to port our CICS emulation (on UNIX) software to. The RS was chained to the floor behind locked steel doors at IBMs insistence. Only 4 of us were “allowed” physical access. Yeah, you could get a ladder out of the computer room and lift the false ceiling and crawl over if ya really wanted to. Those were the “UNIX” (we had over 30 flavors we ported to) Wild West days. Miss ‘em.
Smit happens 😀
@@jessefurqueron5555AIX is unlike any of the other vendor Unix flavors; I managed RS/6000 systems for 30+ years. When working on CMU’s Andrew Project in the 80s, I had experiences similar to yours. We also built a small token ring in a conference room. Thank you for making me smile tonight. 😊
@@Gabe-no5zy ah, Andrew, I remember that. It was during a time we were developing a heterogenous distributed 3-phase commit (using distributed black boards), so found Andrew interesting. Followed it and some of the early micro-kernel work that was going on back in the day at CMU. Think I may still have some of those papers/publications stashed somewhere. My turn to grin.
Wonderful ... I wish internet was so easily accessible during my school and college days. This clarified a lot of stuff which I used to ignore or skip due to boredom or unable to get clarity.
Thank you Gary for this very clear and cogent explanation of the historical evolution of UNIX, BSD, LINUX, MacOS etc. Suggestion: In a follow-up video it might be interesting to viewers to talk about virus and malware resistance of UNIX and UNIX-like code compared to DOS, Windows and their various descendants.
this is great explanation, best i have heard yet. thanks
Core Summary : 12:54
Thanks a ton Gary for telling the whole history and clearing the doubt on Linux vs Unix :)
Thank to you i don't have to watch full video
Yes, big thumbs up. Now retired, your survey of UNIX is like a walk down memory lane for my working career. As an instructor in a large Tech Corporation in the 80s and 90s, I have seen about every flavor of UNIX that came along. I also taught K&R C and variations. This is a very nice video and I will recommend it to some folks I onow will appreciate it.
As it happen I was on a school tour of Bell Labs in the 70s, and I wouldn't be surprised it I passed Kernighan or one of the others in the hall.
Thanks for this video. I have also subscribedl
I usually get bored listening to technical reviews/education but don't know why I kind of enjoyed listening to this video about unix vs linux. Thanks Gary.
Great video, been a Linux user for 20 years and enjoyed the history lesson.
I pretty much knew the story, but had forgotten completely about Minix!
That was fun. I'm an old timer that used Unix SVr4 at AT&T and rode that whole mutation train to today.
Great thorough and quick presentation! I had no idea.
Fantastic video. The first part was a little difficult to follow along with because of the fast speaking, but this video propelled my wife's homework further. The source code examples, development tree, and the license plate examples you used to explain how everything progressed was fascinating. Thank you for deepening my understanding of this subject.
Thanks For accepting our requests and making this video🔥♥️♥️
Thanks for the review; I was introduced to Linux back in 1994 while being "re-educated" by Workers Comp, at a small college in North Dakota. This was in the Intro to Computers 101 class, they gave a three day class on the OS, and I really fell in love with it, at the time we were also introduced to OS2 Warp and would shortly see the Windows 3.11 that we used in the computer labs be upgraded (very slowly to say the least) to Windows 95, what an upgrade, why it could almost compete with Linux! I have, over the years since played with Linux quite a lot, and have had a duel boot system of Linux/Windows running since I discovered this was an option, before that I had an old computer somewhere in the house set up with Linux so I could play with it at will. Getting back to college, because of the fact I was disabled, I kept a computer in my room, my main machine was a 386 and I had an old 286 Laptop as well which I used for writing papers and such.
I just use WSL2, even easier than dual booting for me. Only thing is that you are basically restricted to Ubuntu or openSUSE.
Thanks Gray !! I have been using Linux Kernel from my Master's Programm and was Not aware of so many Parallel anecdotes was happing from 1970's to 1991 (I came to this world ... :D). so many takeaways from your 14 mins video. Loved it
Greatly appreciated the history and perspective!
Wow..thanks for the lesson..😁😁😁👍👍👍👍
covered pretty much everything.... Using Linux when i got my first PC... Great information and great video
Great summary hitting some very interesting and key highlights. I enjoyed the video!
A whole ITT Technical Institute (which is closed now) course for free explained in very well detail for free! Thank you Gary! 👍🏼You rock man!
Excellent video! Of course, there is so much history left out, which could fill a sustantial book or several hours of video, but you covered the essentials pretty well. The crucial thing leading to Linux was that there was no decent Unix for the x86 ISA PC archtecture, let alone a free one. Actually, there was a good start made by Sun, using a fusion of BSD and Sys V, but it was for the non-PC Sun 386i (1988), which remained my main mount until 1995. Sun produced it for only a year, before dropping the Motorola and Intel processors to concentrate on SPARC. Had Sun persisted with the 386 and adopted the similar ISA PC architecture, we would all be using SunOS and not the vastly inferior Windows! The x86 PC ISA architecture was actually very powerful, but needed a large motherboard with a lot of supporting chips, so Sun could make more profit on technical workstations with its tiny fully custom SPARC boards. From the appearance of the revolutionary Compaq Pro 386 around 1985 until Linus released Linux circa 1992 there was at best an expensive 286-based Unix for ISA PC's called SCO Xenix (an ISA PC being defined by its ability to boot DOS from a floppy). By 1995, Linux in various distributions was rock-solid and far easier to install on PC's than, say, SunOS (later Solaris) on Sun workstations. By 2001, I was able to have a Linux server run for 22 months without a reboot. Of course, around the end of the century, SCO (who bought Unix from AT&T) fought back with a lawsuit against Linux, but that didn't stop Linux from achieving the world domination which originally was a joke by Linus :-) As an afterthought, one should recall the importance of Eric Raymond's essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", which enshrined "open source" in a way which the great Richard Stallman never could despite his utterly crucial and overwhelming contributions. Stallman and Torvalds together deserve a Nobel Prize (yeah, I know, not one of Nobel's disciplines, but if Sergei Korolev was considered, so should they ...).
God bless Linus Torvalds.
I am so glad I found out about Linux in the 90s when I was in college.
I cut all ties to MS.
@thegrandfinale2 Not BS at all. I had a 386 running Windoze 3.1, and when I got Internet access and 8.3 filenames wouldn't cut it any more, I wasn't going to pay $$$ for the overweight multicrashing mess that was Win95/98, so I went 'shopping' and ended up with Debian Woody. That must have been about 2002. Immediately stopped using 3.1 and my desktop box has been Microsoft-free since that hard drive died.
1997 Slackware
Being biased just makes you pigeonholed... Why cut out the most successfully public OS?!
Did you ever use MacOS, BeOS, etc.. because they too were derived from UNIX, just as Linux was, and Microsoft came full circle as well.
@@ER_aka_RAM Linux is *NOT* UNIX.
It's UNIX-like.
Neither is BeOS. In fact, BeOS is written in C++.
And outside of MacOS you will find aboslutely no reference or even mention of UNIX in any shape or form when it comes to the OS.
You are correct about MacOS and Minix, though.
TheBadassTonberry ...your username says it all, so I’ll spare you the flaming response.
However, I’ll make it super easy for your narrow minded melon to consume. No UNIX, no Linux.
Enjoy being ignorant 👋🏼
Thanks for a very clear explanation about the history of these OSs :)
Always awesome content Gary! Love your videos
IT’S A UNIX SYSTEM!, I KNOW THIS!
So much information in a nutshell!! How long have you worked on this video sir?
Mainly just today.
Gary Explains I expected something longer😂😂... Anyways very good video Sir! Feed us more🔥
Been looking for this kind of explanation. Thanks!
Good work , and well done for not flooding it with adverts that would have been a killer
Started life 30 years ago with BSD 4.3 Tahoe on the Tahoe architecture.
It was refreshing to go over the history again. Thanks, Gary!
Absolutely wonderful video very clear and I really like having this piece of information as a programmer, having it obtained through a short video instead of a lengthy book, source code inspection or lecture is a great bonus :3
Wow, can’t believe so much info fir into 14 min, what I tried to understand for a week in easy to understand 14 min TH-cam video. Thank you very much !
Someone else asked (now deleted) for explanation of mach kernel (core of Mac OS) which is really an explanation of micro kernel vs. "macro" kernel and how Jobs used mach (out of CMU if I recall correctly) to build the original NeXTSTEP which became OpenSTEP and now Mac OS.
That would be very interesting, since the kernel used in macOS is not quite monolithic and definitely not a microkernel.
+Billy Bob mach is 100% a microkernel which is one of the differentiators between it and other BSD variants.
Since 1996 macOS actually runs on the XNU kernel, a derivative of MACH, which is a hybrid kernel that has both microkernel and monolithic kernel characteristics.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
WOW... So, reading the comments on this video wasn't irritating. People actually know what they're talking about, unlike what happens on other channels.
Sehnsucht does makes one wonder if the core system of mac is opensource if mac apps could be implemented on linux
Unix history has something mythical and mystical to it, it's like the OS hero of the computer Odyssey.
Thanks Gary, always a pleasure to follow one of your "classes" 😉
Wow Gary - the best video explaining this complicated history. Well done.
I lived through most of this, started using Ultrix in the early 80's. I work at Google now. Accurate summary.
@dlbattle100 That's really interesting. I started with BellSouth in the mid-80s. Previously, my only experience with "real" computers was in the USAF in the late '60s. Most of them were hardwired. There was no programming, just replacing components. Fast-forward to '79 and I began going to night school to learn programming. Eventually I bought a little Commodore 64, attached an RS-232C interface and connected a surplus TP-1000 (DEC) teleprinter. I wrote a short program in BASIC to entertain the kids. By the late '80s, I was the only system specialist in Operations on nightshift maintaining software and datacom for 66 minicomputers. Lotsa fun! That's when you pray 9-1-1 doesn't crash.
1:00 - Stop right there. Ken Thompson was invited in to write the documentation. He didn't invent Unix, he wrote the user_manual. Now he did an exceptionally fine job, and big chunks of credit for the success Unix enjoyed, have to go to Ken for writing a good manual. But the two men who wrote Unix and got it to run, were Ritchie & Kernigan.
They wrote the C language, to write Unix. C exists because of Unix, and Unix exists because of C.
DARPA wanted a computer network that would survive a nuclear war, so they funded the creation of TCP/IP, to allow two Unix boxes to communicate over the network, even when parts of that network were taken down. The internet we have today exists, so two Unix boxes can talk to each other even during a nuclear war.
While I'm writing comments .... Linux exists because a lot of people wanted a system on their home computers, which was as good and as capable as what they had at work, where they had Unix. Probem is, the Unix code was owned by Berkeley, and it was copyrighted. So a movement formed up to get around that, with Richard Stallman at the head. Stallman and the Hurd of GNUs, began to write a kernel like Unix, and to write "copies" of all the Unix tools, like the C compiler...
Much of the software we have today in Linux, came straight from the GNUs, including gcc the compiler, and gimp the graphics & photo editor, and bash (the Bourne Again SHell) and heaps of other stuff. They took the concepts & ideas directly from Unix, but they wrote their own code to achieve these things, which had nothing in common with the Unix code...
They had some success, and some failure. They had plans / dreams for their kernel, which were just slightly too ambitious...
Enter Linus Torvolds, in Finland, who was 19 years old, in 1991, and who was studying computer science at college, and using a computer at uni which had MINIX, a Minimum version of Unix. He decided he wanted his own version of it, so he started to write one, and he began with the kernel.
Some smart GNUs, realised what the Hurd were doing (and other groups) was almost compatible with what Linus was doing, so the ported some of their tools over to work with Linus's kernel. Jokingly, they called the result "Linux". It worked, and it worked incredibly well. And people loved it and joined the project, and did more work which made it work better...
Linus tells us he is good with code and bad with people. Linus is a bl00dy grreat liar! Linus is one of the best people people on the planet! He swears at us he and has tantrums, and makes people laugh, and everybody loves him. Linus is great!
In about 2003, I saw an interview, written in Dr Dobbs (I think) with Ritchie, Kernigan & Thompson, where they were asked about Linux. Clearly, the interviewer expected them to hate it and unload on it, because it was a cheap back-yard copy. All 3 of the fathers of Unix, loved it, and claimed Linux as just-another-Unix, different from the others in one significant way - it had found a clever way around the copyright & ownership of Berkeley University. Apart from that, it was just another Unix, and they were delighted it was doing well....
LOL and just like that Ken Thompson's contributions have been downgraded to just the guy who wrote the documentation... I think you got your facts a bit wrong their sparky... For starters, the first version of Unix was written in assembler language. The re-write was in C after a couple years when the language was sufficiently mature.
Gary - I wouldn't call it a downgrade. Good documentation is something a lot of successful projects have lacked. The high (compared to others at the time) quality of the documentation, for Unix and for C, was a major part of why they became so successful.
The first attempt at writing Unix was done in assembler, yes. That turned out to be quite difficult. They did get something to run, but it wasn't by any means what you'd call a successful operating system. That was about '67 or 8. Dennis Ritchie in particular, had a tantrum about trying to write complex and difficult code one assember instruction at a time, and resolved to solve the problem by writing a better upgraded version of his favourite high level language, which was called B, and because it was B plus a bit, he called it C.
The convention at the time, was that low level languages could access hardware, and real men and geeks used those, but high level languages existed so the Dean of Economics, or the Dean of Religious Studies could write something, like 'Hello World', so you could say the million dollar COMPUTER was of use to 37 faculties not 3.... The idea of writing a high level language that had complete access, like assembler, broke all existing conventions...
Do you have an source material for all this pontificating? For example have you read The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin - by Peter H. Salus?
Gary - I don't remember exactly who my source was, there have been about a dozen of them.
Story as told, by Richie & Kernigan, was that they both worked to make Unix, but when writing that in assembler turned into such a complex drudge, Ritchie had a dummy-spit and wrote a language which had source-code and semantics and practice very much like B, (which he liked) but allowed complete hardware access like assembler, and he called it C. And to make that work, he had to write a compiler. SO, he had a mini-computer, like a wardrobe or a filing cabinet, and he was trying to write an operating system for it, and he was trying to write a language to write the OS, and he was trying to write a compiler / linker / assembler, to run on that computer, so he could write... It is a little bit like lifting yourself off the ground by pulling your socks up. And in the middle of that, they found Brian Thompson, who could and did write exceptional documentation, that people who were not extreme computer / digital geeks could read. (Edit: They may have found him at a game of Dungeons & Dragons, which all 3 played...) That's why they bought him drinks and dinner and showered him in compliments and asked him to join their project, so they didn't have to spend six hours a day trying to write up what they were doing...
Well, without sources that is just a fairy tale. If you read the book which I mentioned then there are direct quotes from all of the guys involved and it reads different to your version. There is also a book called "The Oral History of Unix" which I haven't had a chance to read fully, but a very light skim of it doesn't seem to corroborate your version.
Nicely explained. I am a linux professional with over a decade experience but still got many new things watching this video. Thanks.
Great summary. I lived through those times and cut my teeth on Solaris after moving from PDP and VAX mini computers, and Unisys mainframes. Also, had the great opportunity to play with LISP machines (which I fondly remember how much ahead of their time they were involving AI).
It’s crazy how C is still widely used today and one of the best programming languages for imbedded systems, game programming, and more.
Linux is not embedded system. It is not game. It is more. And it written in C. No C++ allowed
@@ahnafhabib36 linus Torvalds doesn't like C++. Linus Torvalds does like C. Ok. Ask yourself why?
C++ works fine on Linux. Ok.
Linux does not work on C++. Linux works fine on C.
It's not the best at all - for embedded it's a matter of compilers availibility...
It is not crazy, it is entirely unsurprising. C was developed by smart people to be most suitable for specific tasks and they did a great job. The only reason to replace it would be to overcome deficiencies of which there are few.
@@craigsjWell there's Rust now, not a drop-in replacement but it have it's qualities
During my professional career from the late 70s though the 2000s, I managed an assortment of workstations and servers using many different OSes: TOPS10, TOPS20, RSX, VMS and multiple different versions of of Unix including Ultrix, OS/1, SunOS/Solaris. Even though Linux was quite popular when I retired, it had not reached the "mainstream" where I worked. I do have a couple of issues with those who guided the early development, much of which came from K&R definition of C.
Although technically not part of the C Programming language, the choice of using null terminated strings has lead to many issues. The obvious other choice was a counted string. While both allow "walking off the end of the string", the latter is more likely to trip hackers up.
Second, the fact that there is still no robust error reporting and help systems is disheartening. Pass/fail is just not enough. The VMS error reporting system is/was so much more robust including levels of success and failure (warning, error, severe error) and a unified library of messages that could be expanded.
Third, I am still surprised that there is no "true" way of locking a file and that Access Control Lists have not caught on. Clearly there is no demand from the user community for these features.
Finally, with the cost of storage continuously falling, it is probably to late for file versioning. It would never replace GIT or other true version control systems, but wouldn't it be nice if your favorite editor just made a new version of the file instead of overwriting the exiting one ?
Great video. Thanks for explaining, Gary.
I'm from 80's programming in C, Pascal, ASM, etc. And OS Unix and its branches are remarkable. Nowadays distros offer a lot of flavors for users and programmers.
Your video is awesome. And content is really useful info for sharing to people learning computing.
...... And now reading an 800-paged book on Ubuntu in preparation for the official rid of MS.
@@goclick A year later.... I became experienced Linux user. I read this book by Matthew Hemke. Bought it in fact. However, I use ArchoLinux. I'm through with the normal Linux ritual of installing Arch and Gentoo. I also did a Linux certification course. I LIKE LINUX!
Thank you Gary. A very comprehensive and detailed explanation. After many years, this is the first time, I have heard a detailed,wholesome explanation of UNIX/LINUX. Good job. Thanks again
Glad it was helpful!
Gary, you are the best. I love your reviews man !!
Congrats for your lesson. As a brazilian who badly speak english, i could understant with ease everything you said. Thanks!
at which point derived mac os from bsd?
i know, all mac devices are a further development of an early bsd clone, i'm just wondering where the two things split parts
Gary, thanks for the trip down memory lane! I started to use UNIX at a University in the, ummmm, gotta figure it out, would have been the 80s. So I can remember System V versus bsd. However, I hadn't realized that Mac OS was based upon UNIX! I just went into the terminal on my Mac PRO and OMFG - "vi" works!!!!!!! (I was fully on the vi side, never used emacs)!
VI FOREVER!!!
I suspect that others are saying this same thing. I was a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s. The cool kids in my department had DEC Unix machines supplied by a research grant but I wasn’t part off that so I didn’t get one. At the time, the GNU project was converting all the Unix tools to opensource but was bogged down in some sort of religious dispute over the design of a modular kernel. Essentially, Linus simply wrote an old fashioned compile-it-all-in 386 kernel and that is all that it took - the seed crystal for a full power Unix for all. It was the perfect learning experience which grew with the development of Linux. My engineer brother schooled me on the video timings needed to get the X-window system running (remember dot files?). It compiled and ran the open-source GRASS GIS critical for my dissertation and enabled me to write my own image processing software. The only downside that it has spoiled me: Unix rewards skill and is a pleasure to use, Windows only offers you tedium where one has to mouse around and search fields of icons or lists of files; “ls -ldt *damnfile" is so much better.
Great explanation! Best video on this topic.
AT&T was a regulated monopoly at the time unix and c were invented (I’ll mention c++ also since I met Bjarne a long time ago). I wonder if not for that if there would have been any ‘nix or if we would have been stuck with only dos outside the mainframe domain.
Could you do a FreeBSD vs OpenBSD vs NetBSD? Best regards and thanks for all your great videos!
After early success (when UNIX is on DEC PDP-7 ), Ken Thompson set out to implement a Fortran compiler for the new system , but ( when UNIX is on DEC PDP-11) instead came up with the language B, influenced by BCPL. B language was an interpretive language with the performance drawbacks implied by suvh languages, so Dennis Ritchie developed it into one he called 'C' language.
- reference :
The Design Of The UNIX Operation System by : Maurice J. Bach
VERY helpful/informative , many thanks !
Good video. I lived through the whole thing. Was working at Bellcore that was split from Bell Labs in 1984 so had access to all the source code to Unix. Cut my Unix sys admin teeth on pre sysV versions, still have the hard copy of manuals complete with the Bell logo from 3.0 to 5.0. Became a SunOS SA through the 90s, got disgusted when that was replaced with Solaris of course, Sun really screwed up that transition, and was downloading Slackware in the late 90s onto floppy disk. Am installing my current favorite flavor, Ubuntu Mate onto a system right now on a nice little Core i7 Gigabyte Brix mini computer because the SSD that was installed previously went bad. Thanks.
I lived through that entire transition as well, but my company transitioned to Xenix! Talk about a huge disappointment and going dow the wrong path, Xenix was a complete boondoggle for us, we would have been much happier with Solaris (I know its no SunOS but trust me, Xenix was a disaster).
My company was run by the typical greedy executives that simply chose which OS we would use based on an oversimplified misunderstanding of what each one costs to run (TCO). In the end I was able to move everything to FreeBSD for the servers and macOS (which is mostly FreeBSD) for the desktops. We ran that for many years with very low cost of maintenance (TCO), so in the end it all worked out just fine. LOL
I'm raising 2 kids who are teens now and still working a full time job. So I have to choose my hobby endeavors based on the time I have to spend on them. But I wouldn't mind giving BSD another go. Is there a favorite flavor you prefer?
Wasn't Xenix bought by Microsoft at one point? They didn't want it to succeed. I actually used Venix on an IBM PC back in the 80s when at Bellcore. They sold it bundled with a 10MB hard disk at the time. The cooling of the IBM PC wasn't up to a hard drive so I had to run it with no cover and a fan blowing on it. Still it was cool having Unix running on a desktop.
Many of the early Unix vendors thought they could capitalize on the OS. Even software developers would charge 10x as much for a Unix version of software compared to a DOS/Windows version. They assured Microsoft dominance and cut their own throats. Open source saved the technology and now we actually have an alternative to expensive proprietary solutions.
I did a little looking at some of the BSD vs. Linux issues. A big one is software availability. I will spin up a VM with FreeBSD and kick the tires. But for something that I can give to my wife to use (she unknowingly has been using Mint Linux for the past 2 months) it needs to be pretty polished.
Great video! I know it's been up for two months, but I do want to say thanks for posting it! Finally! Someone who actually "gets it" for how UNIX and Linux are not the same. I've yet to see another video explain it as well and clearly as you did!
This has been exceptionally helpful. I've spent years, wondering what was the real difference.
great video, thanks for your time and explanation
12:30 FreeBSD is an OS, that is kernel plus applications. On top of that you can install 3th party applications. The kernel and the basic application are maintained by one team.
As is the case with the other BSDs, to my knowledge.
@@globetrotterdk It is true for NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, and I believe DragflyBSD. Some distribution may add on these, like PC-BSD.
All these acronyms (BSD, UNICS, Etc) remind me of the brief period I worked in Intel i Ireland. They called the factory where drives were made, the Storage Technology Division, or STD for short LOL
I have been working on Linux since 2001 but this is the best explanation about UNIX and LINUX I ever found. Many important information and the example of the compilation at the end just excellent. Thank you. You get a new sub
Garry... I am astonished how much information you put into these videos and make it feel almost like we are having a chat. BTW I would love to watch a video on your laptop/PC setup.
That's pretty interesting I didn't knew about that about Linux and Unix, apart from Wikipedia I always come to your channel to learn more about technology
The Professor is a wealth of info, and his way of explaining things is very engaging.
I have FreeBSD files in my kali distro. Is that normal or is it some type of malware? Btw I subscribed. Just found you and your explanation was excellent!
Muse i think its normal.
I find you very amusing
Good morning from MADRID. Fantastic explanation!!!! I love the old photos and your Red Hat CAP. I am envy!!!!!. Thumbs up for you and other one who will learning from nice people like you. As MR SPOOK used to said.: Long life and prosperity!!!! Thanks indeed.
Great work as a student i were just here to get some points to add on my slide but get a lot of amazing facts and information thanks