I've said this in a few of these videos, but it's very apparent here. Gary Kildall was the perfect co-host for this show. Here is a guy that invented personal computer operating systems as we know it. And here he is talking to a couple of UNIX guys about Top View, Concurrent DOS etc. Not once does he talk down to anyone he interviews or carry on like a know it all. And the fact that his products had pretty much lost out to competitors by this stage and yet he still demonstrates a love of technology just shows what a great guy he was. Gary Kildall will forever be one of my heroes.
Gary lost the plot, ended up getting battered after a skinfull and that’s the story of one of the greatest minds and innovators in the entire history (70 years?) of computers. He’s an 80s equivalent of Babbage or Ada Lovelace or Alan T. I guess his next incarnation was Steve jobs (after the rehiring). And now we have …… um….. oh shit…… we’re fucked!
@@AcornElectron comparing Jobs and Kildall is doing Gary great injustice. For one, there's not a single person that I head of that had anything but praise for Gary Kildall. Not just in terms of his professional career but his personality, he was an outstanding guy. Jobs was a moron who treated people with contempt and hate.
11:04 - "You can't plug every computer into the same network but I think that's something to watch in the future". That must have sounded like the ramblings of a mad man back in those days when 2400 baud modems were the gold standard!
Not really, the internet was pretty robust at that time, most universities were connected to it, and a lot of students were using it. We were already well on the way to connecting every computer to the same network.
@@oldtwinsna8347 No, @mrsleep0000 is kind of right. Those weren't *just* terminals connected to mainframes in isolation. I mean there _were_ terminals connected to mainframes (and minicomputers, and workstations) for sure, but a lot of those machines were connected to the early internet in 85. TCP/IP was already a thing and by then there were already a couple thousand machines online in the US and Europe for sure. Even some personal computers would have probably been able to connect to the net with some hassle; the support for it wouldn't have been there yet. But the writing was on the wall for sure,for most people dealing with UNIX in an institutional setting would have been able to tell you that distributed computing over networks was going to be a big thing. It wasn't any wild prediction.
He lost his life all because he went into an MC ran bar wearing leathers, not realizing some hardcore MC's dont take kindly to doing so if your not in an actual MC. The more I think about it and Garys personality, I imagine he stopped into the bar seeing the bikes parked outside and assumed he would be among friendly people. It pains me to say Kildall is the Tesla of personal computing. Depression is a mutha..... still I think he would have made it out of his personal slump had the bar incident never happened. I think all the time what big tech would be like today with Gary still with us.
Sorry, but this video shows what a major a**hole Kindall was. His rip on Commodore was totally uncalled for. In reality, Commodore did have a Unix machine ready to ship which could have made Unix a house hold OS. Commodore killed it to promote the Amiga.
In 1985 Gary Kildhal said that Unix will replace CP/M The father of all DOS systems. His vision is becoming a reality after almost fourty years. He was one of those who were born way before their time.
Funny that Information Week guy hated the concept of UNIX in micro computers just like today. However let's not forget MacOS (ex OSX) is even UNIX certified.
@@rugcutter284 Not Unix, but Unix-like. That was the goal, as Linus Torvalds (creator of the Linux OS) said. And via Linux, the whole idea of the Unix has conquered the world. You can always scrap the Linux and use some other OS if you want, for some cases it doesn't change much if anything, but that is not the opposition, as even that is the spirit of the Unix that UI and programs are easily portable regardless what OS you run.
The final news segments are a fascinating look into the history of that period. "Of the 17,000 DoD computers, Only 30 of them are adequately protected from unauthorized entry" "they are currently vulnerable to any mentally unbalanced 16 year old" One would hope a lot of progress has been made since then.
When a teenager (late seventies -- early eighties) I had my first encounters with UNIX in the engineers that worked for my father who used UNIX and were very enthusiastic about it. Then at Uni I had my first look at it in the form of an Apollo Workstation. After that, SUN workstations with which I fell in love -- but couldn't afford for personal use. Then I had to wait for Linux to become really usable, in the early naughts. Around 2013-14 I wiped Windows off my work laptop and never looked back. Proving Mr. Schindler completely wrong. We have only one Windows computer in the house: the school laptop my oldest son uses.
The moment we had minix in college, I fell in love with it. The basic architecture of everything is a file is elegant and makes it so simple to develop complex applications, basically if you could read and write to a file you could do 80% of integration already. Only IP was a bit of a framework but even those calls were nicely standardized by then early 90s. I developer in the mid 90s on Linux and moved it to SCO and at the most had minuscule changes. Then we moved to Tru64 and I just ran make and we were on 64bits.
Imagine living in the world where Microsoft word is 2nd to IBM Writing Assistant and DOS is spoken about 2nd to UNIX, if you did.. you really lived at the peak of civilization
I only use Macs, and it's easy to forget but when I'm in the Terminal its there, the spirit of DMR and UNIX it's there. Thank you to all those people we enjoy such a wonderful OS.
Gary was the humblest dude. He had the chance to mention CP/M but didn’t. Paul Schindler with his usual mega bad take attempting to predict the future.
Bad take? He nailed it on the head. Did UNIX take over the desktops from MS DOS? Nope, eventually it even got pushed out of the server space by Linux. And before you say Mac OS, try porting an actual UNIX application to Mac OS (or vice versa, a Mac OS app to some non-Apple UNIX) and then tell us how Mac OS has a lot to do with UNIX. Today, legally, UNIX simply means that an OS passed a certain certification process, which hasn't got anything to do with code origin, architecture etc, as long as it ticks a certain number of boxes: and Mac OS ticks some of those boxes in a rather trivial way - stubs for certain functionality are there, but they don't do anything; and that's how Mac OS is a certified UNIX. BTW, a distribution of Linux can also be UNIX certified, although almost nobody cares to do that (but it's been done at least once). Are we now going to start arguing that Linux is UNIX?
Did you see the episode on Windows 3.0? Before they could even talk about Windows, Gary had to talk about GEM, his GUI operating system. I got the impression that he felt upset at the success of Windows. That show must have been rough for him.
Blink and you'll miss the reference about Nintendo showing off their new "game playing robot". This was ROB, the robot included with the Nintendo Entertainment System as part of their marketing strategy to say "look, it's not a 'game console', it's a toy and an 'entertainment system'".
It is funny to hear them talking about the reliability of UNIX. Remember that they are comparing UNIX to other mainframe operating systems like IBM OS/360 and its descendants, certainly not to MS-DOS or its descendants. In OS/360, the system stays running even if a CPU burns out.
@@alfredklek I would say every smart phone runs on an UNIX-like or UNIX-derivate system - > Android = Linux and iOS = BSD (Darwin, the kernel of iOS is a BSD-derivate).
3:02 never knew Bill Murray was a UNIX systems admin? All kidding aside, I loved this show. Remember watching it in the 80’s. Could never do it today, because most tech people do not own a tie.
Funny that Bill Joy made that remark about UNIX missing an office suite. By acquiring, porting and then Open-Sourcing staroffice - OpenOffice - LibreOffice etc, he like no other removed that particular obstacle.
@@ianmorgadovillasenor215 So much confusion but yeah when this was going on, I remember hearing their babble, but I was programming my spectrum in machine code - had no idea of reality fun times
20:37 Interprocess communication I thought would be a big one: the ability to pipe data directly between running processes, rather than having to go through temporary files.
Windows exists. It can run any program written for it from the last 25 years. And no, Android and iOS are not UNIX, don't have portable programs either, their software become completely obsolete every few years.
I actually interviewed with Gary at Digital Research around ‘85 or ‘86. He was not a believer when it came to UNIX and the Santa Cruz operation a few miles up the coast managed to eat his lunch.
That Schindler guy was right about UNIX though, and I think Linux took over the world because it managed to solve all of those problems that UNIX had that he was talking about. Especially in being more user friendly by way of it's open licensing, and more portable.
Pretty much everything today runs a form of UNIX. You iPhone's OS based on UNIX. Same for Mac OS. Android is Linux (another form of UNIX). 80% of the Web runs on Linux servers. Your car's computer(s) run a form of UNIX...
I didn't get my first taste of Unix until around 2002-2003. One of my friends was a contributor to the FreeBSD project and he wouldn't stop talking about it, it was my first unix OS.
This show would be sofa king awesome if it were still on today! Id love to do a reboot of the show and literally use the original set, wardrobe, and cameras/music. Have people on Like Lisa Su in huge ass 80s shoulder pads or Jensen Huang in some gigantic 80's glasses Yeah, that be fuckin great, id watch every week!
People would be very surprised how many companies still run UNIX based main/mini-computer systems to run their legacy systems. Some companies just keep patching their old systems and refuse to do a data migration and equipment upgrade. Almost all government systems have some UNIX based equipment.
Thats what the Sparc division from Oracle still lives on (aka ex Sun Microsystems computer division). The entire Oracle business model basically is to live off from those customers! If there is one dying company which in 40 years wont exist anymore it is definitely Oracle, the writing has been on the wall for ages, well before the Sun merger!
That "if it ain't broke" business mentality isn't strictly limited to OS/software. When I worked at the local phone company 20 years ago, the only reason they would replace switching equipment was due to the lack of available replacement parts - some systems were over 30 years old before they'd be decommissioned due to lack of parts.
25:00 If only that Unix-hating guy knew that you could do everything in that fancy $10 crossword puzzle helper with the words file and grep command found for free in every version of Unix and its derivatives
In 2020 I use sco UNIX everyday to support customers on the "legacy" system, it's a great OS and when you see at times customer servers with uptimes in the multiple of years you know it's doing something right. I won't lie when I first saw it and only being in my early 30s sitting in front of a terminal it was a learning curve but really worthwhile.
SCO System V had some really annoying quirks, the package system was terrible for example and it was always lacking on security. But it was stable for sure and probably the first full on Unix on Intel machines. I programmed C++ on it through Telnet on my customer’s development system :)
Weird, would have expected one of you / us other nerds to by now say "And now most of the internet runs on Linux (yes yes and GNU tools) - Open Source Unix, effectively." Whole many many square miles of datacenters across the world. Linux. I installed it in 1997 and it prompted me to login. I was wondering what the hell this was all about. Then I did. And got on IRC. And even though I was a DOS power-user, this had all this depth and beauty. I kinda saw it like the difference in wonder between an above ground pool and a beach on Hawaii. Is that the same, though, even though it kinda seems the same? DOS only had a shallow dimension but this could do _everything well_ and better than DOS, and, that was the tough part about it. "So wait you can just put a disk on a path? What about device letters? "Device letters dont exist, but only in your mind." "whoa man I might need to sleep on that for a year". And I think I kinda had to. When your young and havent learned to be open and the world is 1 or 0, this was rough.
I used Minix in college in 1991 and in 1995 I installed Linux 0.99, I was thrilled! I always loved the basic architecture of: “everything is a file”. It’s simple and elegant. And it shows how right they were because it still holds up (mostly). It makes it so easy to program.
Dave Cutler in his CHM interview said something like "the UNIX guys were running around with all their unique competing versions, and it was GREAT for us" (Windows NT).
I read about UNIX back in the mid 1980s when there was even a software engineering company that sought to create a variation of UNIX that resembles Windows, but I believe that specific variation ended up getting discarded for there were problems trying not to get into trouble with IBM, Xerox, Microsoft and/or Apple.
People calling UNIX user unfriendly, computer security still vulnerable to 16-year-olds, a million UNIX-derivatives and distributions created regularly, Word still one of the most popular text processors, automation making jobs redundant, Nintendo still toying with weird game ideas. Not much has changed
haha Exactly! Like not even a day passed since then. Sadly products are in most cases successful depending their popularity, regardless if they are good or better than others.
@@jessihawkins9116 Which generation is that? Video games took off with Gen-X'ers in the '70s and '80s, and they're old enough to be grandparents. Even a fair number of boomers play video games now. Nika, mentioned six relevant, things, of which only _one_ was a offhand reference to Nintento, and _that_ was enough to trigger you into shaking you first at some vague generation which could be any from the last 60 years, probably including your own? Ever think this might be less a generational thing and more just a _you_ problem?
That discussion and analysis of Unix as an alternative to other microcomputer operating systems reminds me of similar discussions regarding Linux as an alternative to Windows for PCs 5-15 years ago.
Here is Silicon valley all the Retailers have vanished... ComputerLand/BusinessLand/ Frys/ Micro Center / and even the used and recycled... Weird Stuff and many many small stores. Only place left is over priced Target/Walmart/BestBuy. The flea market DeAnza Electroncis Flea Market is near death of Covid ... Not easy building your own or doing a project. Its a Hobby long long gone by now.
Love that they're saying that new user interfaces as applications make Unix better to use, but I still use command line functions (including those that they were saying should be made simpler) every day... :)
and 36 years later I'm watching this on a laptop running linux, but alsocould have watched it on my phone, also running linux... not exactly unix, but close enough
22:53 This was true. Deliberate vendor-introduced incompatibilities between different Unix platforms was what killed it. But it also allowed Linux to step into the breach. And conquer the entire computing world.
I was a Unix sysadmin in the 90s and the killer apps were RDBMS and TCP/IP services especially web servers. Interesting how Bill Joy didn't predict that despite delivering TCP/IP into Unix. The internet going public in 94 was the catalyst.
@24:38 I remember reading about that back in the day. It was supposed to be the future of computing. Seems they never made a breakthrough with optical transistors that made them better then plain old electrical transistors. Wonder if research is still being done on that technology.
Yes their is still work being done on optical elements but much is done to help with the bandwidth issues in the CPU, GPU, and RAM moving data between the 3 parts of the computer.
22:08 still has a valid point 30 years later - granted it did become the ultimate microcomputer OS but the quote of it being a user hostile OS with a lack of software has changed somewhat but still rings a degree of truth.
Most of the times he was wrong. But he is spot on with Unix. It didn't replace MSDOS. It ran on Minis (servers) and it's still hostile to the average user. I'm a Linux user myself and Linux, considering it as the natural successor of Unix, it still has a very small user base on desktops. For those who say but Android is Linux... It could be whatever. People just want to do things and they don't care what's the core of their system. Same applies with Apple's macOS and it's BSD core. What both Android and macOS have in common though is a fully functional and supported desktop environment.
UNIX was the obvious victim of greed, ambition and corrupted competition of companies. UNIX was in spirit, a ground-breaking invention that changed our experience of computing in a way, lifestyle-wise. Its impact can be compared with transistors in hardware. Yet it founded a standard we will certainly adapt far forward.
Shout out to John Mashey who comes off as awkward but now reads as confident. He's doing his best trying to think 30 years ahead of his time. It even looks like he was forced to wear a suit.
Well, Paul Schindler was wrong, Unix is has become one of the most popular OS. Probably most popular if you count embedded systems and phones. It’s all running some form of a Linux kernel.
Unix is very user friendly. It's just picky about who it's friends are. 🙂 Actually, Unix is dying, having been largely superseded by Linux. I've been running Linux, as my main OS, for over 20 years.
13:53 “Open source code”? Never. In fact, AT&T sued the BSD people just a few years later over their inadvertent inclusion of a few lines of Unix source .
Seems like "Open Source" was something different from "Free (as in Freedom) Software", even in that era (and (unfortunately)still is). Classic Unix although being open source, was never free software! (Neither as in freedom, nor as in beer). :-) Not to be confused with BSD variants, which are truly free.
Again, please do not confuse "Open Source" with "Free Software". Unix wasn't free software, but it was open source. You could buy a source license and tweak the code and build your own programs based on it (open source). You couldn't redistribute it and actually you couldn't redistribute even your own programs (that was based on Unix code), because it wasn't free software. Please also, take a look at: czcams.com/video/V5S8kFvXpo4/video.htmlm32s (for details at Unix licensing) and also these: opensource.com/article/17/11/open-source-or-free-software www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html (for details about the difference between open source and free software).
+Γιώργος Κωστόπουλος Classic Unix wasn't open source. The source code was available under a restrictive paid license, which was about as good as you could get in those days, but it was never open source.
Guys, please keep your timelines straight in this discussion. Remember that the term "open source" as we use it NOW was first proposed in 1998. In 1985, it was just the opposite of "closed source" (source code is NOT available in any way), and nothing more.
Well, this program was made 34 years ago and not much has changed regarding UNIX in desktop use! It's still an "up and coming" alternate operating system that will never really get there, as Paul Schindler said... Of course at least UNIX now "exists" for PCs and has it's place but it's still only a niche system in regular desktop use.
Gary is very animated here! Anyone guess why? Yes, he knows UNIX has the capability to crush Gates and his empire. Nothing would please Gary more after IBM and Gates short changed his CP/M. Gates knew this and was one of the first ones to jump in UNiX with XENIX.
10:35 One important difference, which still remains true to this day, is that on Unix and Linux systems, process creation is carefully designed to be a very low-overhead operation. Thus, a shell script can spawn any number of processes to implement the stages of a pipeline, run concurrent background tasks etc, and do so quickly and easily. Whereas on other common systems, including Windows, process creation remains expensive and complicated. Thus, when software originally developed on Linux is ported to Windows, it tends to work less well and less reliably for this among other reasons. Even the Mac, supposedly a Unix system, has had performance issues with multitasking.
I recall in the Air Force reserve in '93 and went on a two week deal. One of the guys brought his Macintosh Tower. He would spend all day on it. I recall him booting it up and took literally 10 minutes to boot. I recall once, after it booted it crashed, and heard him mention a few four letter words and another 10 minutes passed for booting.
I've said this in a few of these videos, but it's very apparent here. Gary Kildall was the perfect co-host for this show. Here is a guy that invented personal computer operating systems as we know it. And here he is talking to a couple of UNIX guys about Top View, Concurrent DOS etc. Not once does he talk down to anyone he interviews or carry on like a know it all. And the fact that his products had pretty much lost out to competitors by this stage and yet he still demonstrates a love of technology just shows what a great guy he was. Gary Kildall will forever be one of my heroes.
Gary lost the plot, ended up getting battered after a skinfull and that’s the story of one of the greatest minds and innovators in the entire history (70 years?) of computers. He’s an 80s equivalent of Babbage or Ada Lovelace or Alan T. I guess his next incarnation was Steve jobs (after the rehiring).
And now we have …… um….. oh shit…… we’re fucked!
@@AcornElectron ... There's still Bill Gates.
@@Leofwine 🤣🤣🤣
Couldn't agree more!
@@AcornElectron comparing Jobs and Kildall is doing Gary great injustice. For one, there's not a single person that I head of that had anything but praise for Gary Kildall. Not just in terms of his professional career but his personality, he was an outstanding guy. Jobs was a moron who treated people with contempt and hate.
11:04 - "You can't plug every computer into the same network but I think that's something to watch in the future". That must have sounded like the ramblings of a mad man back in those days when 2400 baud modems were the gold standard!
That man quickly climbed onto a shoulder of a giant and managed to have a split second peek of the future before he was swatted down to the floor
Not really, the internet was pretty robust at that time, most universities were connected to it, and a lot of students were using it. We were already well on the way to connecting every computer to the same network.
@@mrsleep0000 Those were terminals connected to a mainframe. Not personal computers.
@@oldtwinsna8347 No, @mrsleep0000 is kind of right. Those weren't *just* terminals connected to mainframes in isolation. I mean there _were_ terminals connected to mainframes (and minicomputers, and workstations) for sure, but a lot of those machines were connected to the early internet in 85. TCP/IP was already a thing and by then there were already a couple thousand machines online in the US and Europe for sure. Even some personal computers would have probably been able to connect to the net with some hassle; the support for it wouldn't have been there yet. But the writing was on the wall for sure,for most people dealing with UNIX in an institutional setting would have been able to tell you that distributed computing over networks was going to be a big thing. It wasn't any wild prediction.
Meanwhile, back at DEC...Easynet was humming like a Rolls Royce. Hundreds, maybe over a thousand computers all taking to each other.
Gary Kildall, what a pioneer but ultimate sad and tragic story. God rest his soul. It is great to have these videos to preserve his memory.
Literally every single CC episode has a load of comments just like this one.
I definitely would not have pegged him as a biker bar guy!
@@amaxamon lol Me neither!
He lost his life all because he went into an MC ran bar wearing leathers, not realizing some hardcore MC's dont take kindly to doing so if your not in an actual MC. The more I think about it and Garys personality, I imagine he stopped into the bar seeing the bikes parked outside and assumed he would be among friendly people. It pains me to say Kildall is the Tesla of personal computing. Depression is a mutha..... still I think he would have made it out of his personal slump had the bar incident never happened. I think all the time what big tech would be like today with Gary still with us.
Sorry, but this video shows what a major a**hole Kindall was. His rip on Commodore was totally uncalled for. In reality, Commodore did have a Unix machine ready to ship which could have made Unix a house hold OS. Commodore killed it to promote the Amiga.
In 1985 Gary Kildhal said that Unix will replace CP/M The father of all DOS systems. His vision is becoming a reality after almost fourty years. He was one of those who were born way before their time.
If people like him were born "in the right time" then nothing would change, that's how change works what are you talking about
Funny that Information Week guy hated the concept of UNIX in micro computers just like today. However let's not forget MacOS (ex OSX) is even UNIX certified.
@@Olgasys Android is practically unix. :) Unix is everywhere now. Most of the embedded systems are based on unix.
Linux and Android are not Unix
@@rugcutter284 Not Unix, but Unix-like. That was the goal, as Linus Torvalds (creator of the Linux OS) said. And via Linux, the whole idea of the Unix has conquered the world. You can always scrap the Linux and use some other OS if you want, for some cases it doesn't change much if anything, but that is not the opposition, as even that is the spirit of the Unix that UI and programs are easily portable regardless what OS you run.
Gary Kildall, John Mashey and Bill Joy - wow, three legends.
The final news segments are a fascinating look into the history of that period.
"Of the 17,000 DoD computers, Only 30 of them are adequately protected from unauthorized entry"
"they are currently vulnerable to any mentally unbalanced 16 year old"
One would hope a lot of progress has been made since then.
Progress: today we have are *far* more mentally unbalanced 16-year-olds.
or when Schindler said Unix is in cage? Literally right now with Apple and PlayStation (c' mon both got FreeBSD code so just be together!) or Rhel
UNIX touches me through the telephone... every day.
My telephone runs a Unix derivative, times have changed.
Can you show us where on this doll?
Android is the grandchild of Unix
@@darylallen2485 so is iOS, Android through the Linux line, while iOS through bsd then freebsd then Darwin, macos, iOS
COCOA touches you.
"Why on earth would you want to feature a eunuch on the show?" That gave me a chuckle.
That was even cornier than my assertion in 1990 that, "If UNIX had a baby, it would look a lot like DOS"
When a teenager (late seventies -- early eighties) I had my first encounters with UNIX in the engineers that worked for my father who used UNIX and were very enthusiastic about it. Then at Uni I had my first look at it in the form of an Apollo Workstation. After that, SUN workstations with which I fell in love -- but couldn't afford for personal use.
Then I had to wait for Linux to become really usable, in the early naughts. Around 2013-14 I wiped Windows off my work laptop and never looked back. Proving Mr. Schindler completely wrong.
We have only one Windows computer in the house: the school laptop my oldest son uses.
The moment we had minix in college, I fell in love with it. The basic architecture of everything is a file is elegant and makes it so simple to develop complex applications, basically if you could read and write to a file you could do 80% of integration already. Only IP was a bit of a framework but even those calls were nicely standardized by then early 90s. I developer in the mid 90s on Linux and moved it to SCO and at the most had minuscule changes. Then we moved to Tru64 and I just ran make and we were on 64bits.
Imagine living in the world where Microsoft word is 2nd to IBM Writing Assistant and DOS is spoken about 2nd to UNIX, if you did.. you really lived at the peak of civilization
I only use Macs, and it's easy to forget but when I'm in the Terminal its there, the spirit of DMR and UNIX it's there. Thank you to all those people we enjoy such a wonderful OS.
Gary was the humblest dude. He had the chance to mention CP/M but didn’t.
Paul Schindler with his usual mega bad take attempting to predict the future.
Indeed, Gary seemed like an awesome human being. God rest his soul!
Bad take? He nailed it on the head. Did UNIX take over the desktops from MS DOS? Nope, eventually it even got pushed out of the server space by Linux.
And before you say Mac OS, try porting an actual UNIX application to Mac OS (or vice versa, a Mac OS app to some non-Apple UNIX) and then tell us how Mac OS has a lot to do with UNIX. Today, legally, UNIX simply means that an OS passed a certain certification process, which hasn't got anything to do with code origin, architecture etc, as long as it ticks a certain number of boxes: and Mac OS ticks some of those boxes in a rather trivial way - stubs for certain functionality are there, but they don't do anything; and that's how Mac OS is a certified UNIX. BTW, a distribution of Linux can also be UNIX certified, although almost nobody cares to do that (but it's been done at least once). Are we now going to start arguing that Linux is UNIX?
Did you see the episode on Windows 3.0? Before they could even talk about Windows, Gary had to talk about GEM, his GUI operating system. I got the impression that he felt upset at the success of Windows. That show must have been rough for him.
i like this lotus 123 interface he is talking about. i cant wait to see this in our future applications.
Blink and you'll miss the reference about Nintendo showing off their new "game playing robot". This was ROB, the robot included with the Nintendo Entertainment System as part of their marketing strategy to say "look, it's not a 'game console', it's a toy and an 'entertainment system'".
It is funny to hear them talking about the reliability of UNIX. Remember that they are comparing UNIX to other mainframe operating systems like IBM OS/360 and its descendants, certainly not to MS-DOS or its descendants. In OS/360, the system stays running even if a CPU burns out.
Unix and its various flavors and off-shoots do dominate.
1985: UNIX is too resource intensive for microcomputers.
2008: A Unix-like operating system runs on a computer within your computer.
@NJSynthesis, it happens that I shook hands with Unix "on the banks of the old Raritan". This prepared me to take up Linux less than a decade later.
2022: A UNIX-like operating system runs most of the internet, and the vast majority smart phones in the world.
2022 literally all phones run on a unix like operating system and on low end computers designed for children and tinkerers...
@@alfredklek I would say every smart phone runs on an UNIX-like or UNIX-derivate system - > Android = Linux and iOS = BSD (Darwin, the kernel of iOS is a BSD-derivate).
@@SixStringViolence I stand corrected.
3:02 never knew Bill Murray was a UNIX systems admin? All kidding aside, I loved this show. Remember watching it in the 80’s. Could never do it today, because most tech people do not own a tie.
Funny that Bill Joy made that remark about UNIX missing an office suite. By acquiring, porting and then Open-Sourcing staroffice - OpenOffice - LibreOffice etc, he like no other removed that particular obstacle.
"unix will be used by scientists and engineers for some time"
2020 checking in, unix is still the king of science and engineering
unix ism't used as much as linux, but I know what you meant. Without unix, linux won't even exist.
@@ianmorgadovillasenor215 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
@@ianmorgadovillasenor215 So much confusion but yeah when this was going on, I remember hearing their babble, but I was programming my spectrum in machine code - had no idea of reality
fun times
I was 13 :(
Oh man, what a great program! Thank you for uploading all of these. Man, what a time machine.
"Everybody improves the recipe they received from grandma, or in this case, Ma."
Ha, I got the joke there (AT&T, Ma Bell).
20:37 Interprocess communication I thought would be a big one: the ability to pipe data directly between running processes, rather than having to go through temporary files.
It is
Mark Sobell, the speaker on the left, is still writing UNIX guides and varying them to apply to various flavors of MacOS, Linux, and others.
One year before the Amiga and AmigaOS was released....i guess they were shocked from this event ;-)
In defense of Paul Schindler, let's remember that being 100% wrong is just as difficult as being 100% correct.
Windows exists. It can run any program written for it from the last 25 years.
And no, Android and iOS are not UNIX, don't have portable programs either, their software become completely obsolete every few years.
Paul Schindler is always based and was very correct here!
@@vborovikov That's not completely true! Look at programs for XP which do not run on 10.
@@vborovikov it's derived from Unix, don't be pedantic
*me watching this on my Android phone running a child of Unix*
Came for the report on UNIX, stayed for the story on X-rated video tapes taking center stage at CES. Love it
I actually interviewed with Gary at Digital Research around ‘85 or ‘86. He was not a believer when it came to UNIX and the Santa Cruz operation a few miles up the coast managed to eat his lunch.
Nothing has changed.
3:18 - Woah! now that's a manual!
"a mac lookalike running unix, is that possible?" xD
2019, watching this on Linux and laughing.
I love these old videos of personal computers starting to crawl.
@@Gabriel-kl6bt me too, I still worked on some of these old things and learned unix and dos and windows 3.
Rachael Lee Yeah! ‘A user-hostile OS, dramatically short on software’? Sure proved him wrong!
That Schindler guy was right about UNIX though, and I think Linux took over the world because it managed to solve all of those problems that UNIX had that he was talking about. Especially in being more user friendly by way of it's open licensing, and more portable.
GNU's not UNIX
35 years later, Unix users: "Do you wanna see my rice?"
Pretty much everything today runs a form of UNIX. You iPhone's OS based on UNIX. Same for Mac OS. Android is Linux (another form of UNIX). 80% of the Web runs on Linux servers. Your car's computer(s) run a form of UNIX...
Even Windows has UNIX inside it.
@KMSMista Dumbass.
@@gnagyusa that’s demonstrably untrue.
@@ninjasiren that’s nonsense. And untrue.
Finally, the year of the Linux desktop
"You can't plug every computer on the same network, but I think that's something to watch out for in the future" ... :-)
I didn't get my first taste of Unix until around 2002-2003. One of my friends was a contributor to the FreeBSD project and he wouldn't stop talking about it, it was my first unix OS.
Not a bad one to get started with.
"The head of computer security for the Pentagon said they are currently vulnerable to any mentally unbalanced 16 year old."
It most definitely was. Unix security 35 years ago was *abysmal.*
@@RonJohn63 And what has changed LOL
Aren't we all though lol
Unix was originally designed for developers sharing a computer on a closed network so security was not a concern.
Thinking back to 1985 when this video was made- I was 16 years old and had a modem and home computer. It was 2 years before I used Unix though.
This show would be sofa king awesome if it were still on today!
Id love to do a reboot of the show and literally use the original set, wardrobe, and cameras/music.
Have people on Like Lisa Su in huge ass 80s shoulder pads or Jensen Huang in some gigantic 80's glasses
Yeah, that be fuckin great, id watch every week!
That would be radical dude.
Fucking brilliant.
sofa king 😆
Maybe for the premier episode.
People would be very surprised how many companies still run UNIX based main/mini-computer systems to run their legacy systems. Some companies just keep patching their old systems and refuse to do a data migration and equipment upgrade. Almost all government systems have some UNIX based equipment.
Thats what the Sparc division from Oracle still lives on (aka ex Sun Microsystems computer division). The entire Oracle business model basically is to live off from those customers!
If there is one dying company which in 40 years wont exist anymore it is definitely Oracle, the writing has been on the wall for ages, well before the Sun merger!
That "if it ain't broke" business mentality isn't strictly limited to OS/software. When I worked at the local phone company 20 years ago, the only reason they would replace switching equipment was due to the lack of available replacement parts - some systems were over 30 years old before they'd be decommissioned due to lack of parts.
Let's keep on eye on this "computer networking" thing.
I'm thinking it could be big.
you think?😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Computer networking?? C'mon . . . . that's just crazy talk.
@@Jim-mn7yq I know right next thing you'll know they will be talking about giving us internet that's way faster then dial up🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Imagine if we connected every computer in the world to one network. That's literally impossible
I feel that person’s pain at 3:26
I remember the first time I opened Vi
Gods, you're one of'em Emacs people aren't you.
1985 is the year of Unix I can feel it
25:00 If only that Unix-hating guy knew that you could do everything in that fancy $10 crossword puzzle helper with the words file and grep command found for free in every version of Unix and its derivatives
@19:52 "kind of a Mac lookalike running Unix" - ah Stewart, we have come full circle
Oh, I thought the subject was those Sun Microsystems workstations. To a starry-eyed young man in 1989, they looked like "overgrown Macintoshes".
In 2020 I use sco UNIX everyday to support customers on the "legacy" system, it's a great OS and when you see at times customer servers with uptimes in the multiple of years you know it's doing something right. I won't lie when I first saw it and only being in my early 30s sitting in front of a terminal it was a learning curve but really worthwhile.
SCO System V had some really annoying quirks, the package system was terrible for example and it was always lacking on security. But it was stable for sure and probably the first full on Unix on Intel machines. I programmed C++ on it through Telnet on my customer’s development system :)
The discussion level is great. True experts.
By professionals, for professionals. IQ 93s need not attempt listening.
Weird, would have expected one of you / us other nerds to by now say "And now most of the internet runs on Linux (yes yes and GNU tools) - Open Source Unix, effectively." Whole many many square miles of datacenters across the world. Linux. I installed it in 1997 and it prompted me to login. I was wondering what the hell this was all about. Then I did. And got on IRC. And even though I was a DOS power-user, this had all this depth and beauty. I kinda saw it like the difference in wonder between an above ground pool and a beach on Hawaii. Is that the same, though, even though it kinda seems the same? DOS only had a shallow dimension but this could do _everything well_ and better than DOS, and, that was the tough part about it. "So wait you can just put a disk on a path? What about device letters? "Device letters dont exist, but only in your mind." "whoa man I might need to sleep on that for a year". And I think I kinda had to. When your young and havent learned to be open and the world is 1 or 0, this was rough.
I used Minix in college in 1991 and in 1995 I installed Linux 0.99, I was thrilled! I always loved the basic architecture of: “everything is a file”. It’s simple and elegant. And it shows how right they were because it still holds up (mostly). It makes it so easy to program.
UNIX ….. ya blew it kid!
Dave Cutler in his CHM interview said something like "the UNIX guys were running around with all their unique competing versions, and it was GREAT for us" (Windows NT).
"A Mac lookalike running Unix, is that kind of thing possible?"
26:41 is just a brilliant quote from the Pentagon. Especially since guess how old I was when this show was recorded??? ;-)
I read about UNIX back in the mid 1980s when there was even a software engineering company that sought to create a variation of UNIX that resembles Windows, but I believe that specific variation ended up getting discarded for there were problems trying not to get into trouble with IBM, Xerox, Microsoft and/or Apple.
People calling UNIX user unfriendly, computer security still vulnerable to 16-year-olds, a million UNIX-derivatives and distributions created regularly, Word still one of the most popular text processors, automation making jobs redundant, Nintendo still toying with weird game ideas.
Not much has changed
haha Exactly! Like not even a day passed since then.
Sadly products are in most cases successful depending their popularity, regardless if they are good or better than others.
why is everything a comparison to a video game with your generation? Why can’t you people just grow up?
@@jessihawkins9116 wasn't he talking not only about games? Why didn't you people learn how to read before you grew up?
@@jessihawkins9116 Which generation is that? Video games took off with Gen-X'ers in the '70s and '80s, and they're old enough to be grandparents. Even a fair number of boomers play video games now. Nika, mentioned six relevant, things, of which only _one_ was a offhand reference to Nintento, and _that_ was enough to trigger you into shaking you first at some vague generation which could be any from the last 60 years, probably including your own? Ever think this might be less a generational thing and more just a _you_ problem?
That discussion and analysis of Unix as an alternative to other microcomputer operating systems reminds me of similar discussions regarding Linux as an alternative to Windows for PCs 5-15 years ago.
Ah, Radio Shack. I remember walking into my local Radio Shack just to "smell" the technology booming from the shelves.
Here is Silicon valley all the Retailers have vanished... ComputerLand/BusinessLand/ Frys/ Micro Center / and even the used and recycled... Weird Stuff and many many small stores. Only place left is over priced Target/Walmart/BestBuy. The flea market DeAnza Electroncis Flea Market is near death of Covid ... Not easy building your own or doing a project. Its a Hobby long long gone by now.
27:06: I can't believe they missed the opportunity to solemnly deliver a "boot space into booty space" pun.
I wish this channel produced more videos.
Love that they're saying that new user interfaces as applications make Unix better to use, but I still use command line functions (including those that they were saying should be made simpler) every day... :)
3:19 love those old ADM-3A terminals!
Around 17:22, it's too easy to imagine the nerdier blokes discussing the Unix family tree over beer in a Bay Area tavern.
And nowadays a Unix-like operating system (Linux) is the most widespread OS in the world. 🙂
This. Aged. Very. Well! 🙂
Linux isn't an OS
and 36 years later I'm watching this on a laptop running linux, but alsocould have watched it on my phone, also running linux... not exactly unix, but close enough
Kildall's passing is still shrouded in mystery. Head injuries from a possible fight at a biker bar...
I like this theme more than their newer one :)
22:53 This was true. Deliberate vendor-introduced incompatibilities between different Unix platforms was what killed it.
But it also allowed Linux to step into the breach. And conquer the entire computing world.
Are you referring to the Linux kernel or GNU/Linux or both?
This show is from 1985. Timestamp 13:50. People have been trying to take credit for coining that term since the 1990s.
Serves to remind me, "GNU's Not Unix"
I was a Unix sysadmin in the 90s and the killer apps were RDBMS and TCP/IP services especially web servers. Interesting how Bill Joy didn't predict that despite delivering TCP/IP into Unix. The internet going public in 94 was the catalyst.
I had to lmao at some of this. Most times the questions and answers were on point but some q/a were just blowing smoke in the funniest way.
@24:38
I remember reading about that back in the day. It was supposed to be the future of computing. Seems they never made a breakthrough with optical transistors that made them better then plain old electrical transistors. Wonder if research is still being done on that technology.
Yes their is still work being done on optical elements but much is done to help with the bandwidth issues in the CPU, GPU, and RAM moving data between the 3 parts of the computer.
My goodness...I did half of my CompSci coursework on Sun 3 machines. Back in 1991, I referred to the GUI as "The Uncanny X Windows"
22:08 still has a valid point 30 years later - granted it did become the ultimate microcomputer OS but the quote of it being a user hostile OS with a lack of software has changed somewhat but still rings a degree of truth.
I still have a copy of MS DOS 6 and 6.22 , I miss those days of learning.
MAN, I miss those data center days!!!
I have doubts about the eunuchs story.
Look at the autogenerated captions: half of them interpret UNIX as "eunuchs"
Oh, I'll say it:I got the impression that you called "bollocks" on the "eunuchs" story.
if you want I can make you into a eunich for 500 dollars
Has Paul Schindler ever been right?
I watched a few dozen episodes in the past weeks, I would say he was right about 2 out of 10 times on average
Usually he was dead wrong. His opinion seems so ridiculous now with both IOS and Android being based on the Unix kernel
@@billpotter7162 Android is based on Linux kernel. Though the philosophy is the same.
Most of the times he was wrong. But he is spot on with Unix. It didn't replace MSDOS. It ran on Minis (servers) and it's still hostile to the average user.
I'm a Linux user myself and Linux, considering it as the natural successor of Unix, it still has a very small user base on desktops.
For those who say but Android is Linux... It could be whatever. People just want to do things and they don't care what's the core of their system. Same applies with Apple's macOS and it's BSD core. What both Android and macOS have in common though is a fully functional and supported desktop environment.
I think Paul Schindler predicted that IBM clones would not get anywhere in the market.
UNIX was the obvious victim of greed, ambition and corrupted competition of companies. UNIX was in spirit, a ground-breaking invention that changed our experience of computing in a way, lifestyle-wise. Its impact can be compared with transistors in hardware. Yet it founded a standard we will certainly adapt far forward.
Gary Kildall ... A true legend ❤
Man, I remember these brown offices and conference rooms, even down to the smell. lmao 😂
Shout out to John Mashey who comes off as awkward but now reads as confident. He's doing his best trying to think 30 years ahead of his time. It even looks like he was forced to wear a suit.
Ugh I did not mean for that to come off so mean. He looks like the one person who is correctly predicting the future.
Well, Paul Schindler was wrong, Unix is has become one of the most popular OS. Probably most popular if you count embedded systems and phones. It’s all running some form of a Linux kernel.
Now Linux runs on a $35 Raspberry Pi.
Unix is very user friendly. It's just picky about who it's friends are. 🙂
Actually, Unix is dying, having been largely superseded by Linux. I've been running Linux, as my main OS, for over 20 years.
13:53 “Open source code”? Never. In fact, AT&T sued the BSD people just a few years later over their inadvertent inclusion of a few lines of Unix source .
Seems like "Open Source" was something different from "Free (as in Freedom) Software", even in that era (and (unfortunately)still is).
Classic Unix although being open source, was never free software!
(Neither as in freedom, nor as in beer). :-)
Not to be confused with BSD variants, which are truly free.
Unix was never “open source”.
opensource.org/osd-annotated
Again, please do not confuse "Open Source" with "Free Software".
Unix wasn't free software, but it was open source.
You could buy a source license and tweak the code and build your own programs based on it (open source).
You couldn't redistribute it and actually you couldn't redistribute even your own programs (that was based on Unix code), because it wasn't free software.
Please also, take a look at:
czcams.com/video/V5S8kFvXpo4/video.htmlm32s
(for details at Unix licensing) and also these:
opensource.com/article/17/11/open-source-or-free-software
www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
(for details about the difference between open source and free software).
+Γιώργος Κωστόπουλος Classic Unix wasn't open source. The source code was available under a restrictive paid license, which was about as good as you could get in those days, but it was never open source.
Guys, please keep your timelines straight in this discussion. Remember that the term "open source" as we use it NOW was first proposed in 1998. In 1985, it was just the opposite of "closed source" (source code is NOT available in any way), and nothing more.
UNIX is about to dominate on personal computers.
Well, this program was made 34 years ago and not much has changed regarding UNIX in desktop use! It's still an "up and coming" alternate operating system that will never really get there, as Paul Schindler said... Of course at least UNIX now "exists" for PCs and has it's place but it's still only a niche system in regular desktop use.
Linux is not UNIX. UNIX died when Oracle killed Sun. Nobody apart from a handfull of weirdos uses UNIX.
Well except for Mac os is a cirtified Unix.
@@cptrelentless80085 And every Mac OS user.
@@cptrelentless80085 There are the BSDs!
Just when everyone was about to change to Unix, Spielberg made a movie where 12 yr old broke into Unix system and no-one trusted it anymore
"Will UNIX become the next MS-DOS?"
I don't think it was ever intended to be a toy.
Haha, I laughed hard when I heart it 😉
Comparing a Multiuser and Multitasking operating system to DOS.
MS-DOS was intended to get stuff done inexpensively. Unix lost.
Gary is very animated here! Anyone guess why? Yes, he knows UNIX has the capability to crush Gates and his empire.
Nothing would please Gary more after IBM and Gates short changed his CP/M.
Gates knew this and was one of the first ones to jump in UNiX with XENIX.
Very interesting
10:35 One important difference, which still remains true to this day, is that on Unix and Linux systems, process creation is carefully designed to be a very low-overhead operation. Thus, a shell script can spawn any number of processes to implement the stages of a pipeline, run concurrent background tasks etc, and do so quickly and easily. Whereas on other common systems, including Windows, process creation remains expensive and complicated. Thus, when software originally developed on Linux is ported to Windows, it tends to work less well and less reliably for this among other reasons.
Even the Mac, supposedly a Unix system, has had performance issues with multitasking.
And almost 40 years later I'm warming up to linux os, strange world :P
I've been using desktop Linux since 2009. It's more that just driveable now. Ex-IT project manager but geeky was never my thing. Retired in 2016
My complaint about Unix in the past was it took so long for the computer to start up. Dos was quick.
Oh god, you ain't kidding. I used to work at a Pizza Hut in the 90's, we had to reboot the computer system and it took 90 minutes to boot up.
I recall in the Air Force reserve in '93 and went on a two week deal. One of the guys brought his Macintosh Tower. He would spend all day on it. I recall him booting it up and took literally 10 minutes to boot. I recall once, after it booted it crashed, and heard him mention a few four letter words and another 10 minutes passed for booting.
@10:50 One of the incredible moments in this video, he saw the future of the household
they were crafting households future, not only seeing.
Watching this makes me want to know more about Gary Kildall.
Now THAT is a skullet, no bones about it.
was this computer chronicles high up (building up on the 12th or 13th floor?) or was it on the ground floor? thanks................
Was involved with UNIX in 1972, funny how it took 16 years even then to get to the then main-stream. Even Micro$oft had to embrace it to get to Posix.
Wow, Paul Schindler at 21:45 was brutal!
Before Linux and BSD were around, Unix was notoriously known as clunky and difficult system to use, inferior to other operating systems of the day
Reminds me of being a kid. I love the brand new white sneakers look of it. Just remember- boot time was like 5 minutes.
LINUX is my everyday OS in 2023.
And they tossed in a porn plug in the end (no pun intended) lol
Yeah, and Cheifet was probably at those booths with the adult entertainment, probably purchased a whole bunch of it. 👀😂