Over at Unix.se they’ve published an interview with Dennis Ritchie (inventor of C, co-creator of Unix).
Interview with Dennis Ritchie
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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>How and when did you first come in contact with computers?
>Dennis Ritchie: At some point when I was an undergraduate in >college (about 1960)….
you don’t have to have begun hacking when you were 2 years old to be great at computers 🙂
you don’t have to have begun hacking when you were 2 years old to be great at computers 🙂
<p>
Wouldn’t hurt, especially in today’s job market. I wouldn’t counsel anyone to consider putting meat on the table with IT unless they lived in India.
Wow 43 years in Computer business now. Well I’m 30 with 50 years of Computer expirience. Beat this
)))))
he could spell experience.
I just pictured Linux Nuts having a heart atack when they read he runs NT at work and home. Is this a False picture? Did any of you die? To have one of the creators of Unix use a non unix-ish OS, interesting to think about. On a side note the use of plan 9 for something was interesting.
Unix is dead and the inventor and author of 90% of Unix code admits it by only using Windows NT and the open-source Win32 clone Plan 9! Hahahaha! You wanna know why Unix sucks so much? Look at this:
[Ed: link to illegal content removed.]
see title.
No, it’s not. It’s the unix concepts (everything is a file etc.) taken to the extreme. It’s not a clone of anything, it’s a very different OS.
“To have one of the creators of Unix use a non unix-ish OS, interesting to think about.”
This says something very interesting, doesn’t it. The guy who invented Unix doesn’t think of it as the be-all and end-all OS. In fact, he no doubt thought that he could do much better than Unix when he was creating Inferno and Plan-9, and why would he be mistaken?
Linux zealots could learn something from this. Well…maybe not.
Intellectual types can always come up with something better. Linux isn’t about coming up with the “best” thing. Linux is about taking an idea that works, UNIX, and implementing it. Coming up with a damn good implementation of it. One that can be used to accomplish real work. For all intents and purposes it has accomplished that goal.
He was featured in a article for Linux Journal I believe and they asked him what was the popular OS around the lab and he commented that most people seem to be using *BSD. I thought that was pretty cool. Hey, he has done so much for the computer community, if he wants to run Plan 9 on a winNT machine, so be it!
But there being no justice in the world and all,
we are taking over anyways. ;>
who would have figured?
..and Tux went marching on.
I am impressed with the way Unix is becoming the fundamental structure of many OSs even Windows NT.
Windows NT is much a merger of Windows 3.11/95 and Xenix which was a Unix clone.
There are alot a free distribution. Good implementation is making it easy to install. I am impressed with variants like Linux and all the BSDs. I am working on making my on OS which caries the basic Unix/BSD/Linux structure for a new computer system called C-One. I want to take things back a bit a reduce things down for better runnability on 8/16 bit architecture.
Windows NT is much a merger of Windows 3.11/95 and Xenix which was a Unix clone.
Ha! Nice Troll.
“Windows NT is much a merger of Windows 3.11/95 and Xenix which was a Unix clone.”
No… no no no…
Windows NT got its start from the OS/2 sources… the project was managed by David Cutler of VMS fame, and a great deal of expertise Cutler had gleaned from his VMS work went into the design of the NT kernel. In no way was it related to Xenix, and the Win32 API came out of NT (it was essentially formalized in NT 3.51) and was used in Windows 95 (so the two operating systems would be binary compatible, and excellent move by Microsoft) It certainly wasn’t the other way around… NT predates Windows 95 by a good few years.
was Windows NT 3.1 – and I believe it had some sort of Win32 already. Around that time MS published the Win32s add on for Win 3.1.
“I just pictured Linux Nuts having a heart atack when they read he runs NT at work and home. Is this a False picture?”
What does having Ritchie’s choise of operating systems have to do with Linux? Or more generally what does having a person’s operating system choise have to do with other’s people’s operation system choise. Thing about this and please explain your thoughts. Thanks.
I really think its time OSnews adds a spellcheck function
His name is “Dennis Ritchie but his e-mail aadress starts with “dmr”. What does the M stand for?
Which is too bad, really.
Maybe if Plan-9 or Inferno had become a de facto standard on x86 hardware rather than Linux, computer science could be advancing into a lot more interesting areas and the industry wouldn’t be stuck with a 30+ year-old OS design and trapped in 1970’s C software development techniques.
I remember AT&T marketing Inferno quite aggressively in the early 1990’s but it didn’t go anywhere, obviously. They should have open-sourced it to compete directly with Linux on the same terms.
“I remember AT&T marketing Inferno quite aggressively in the early 1990’s but it didn’t go anywhere”
Well no wonder…. Inferno came out in the late 90’s. It seems that at&t’s marketing branch was ahead of the development labs by a few years. Uhm… a marketing dept ran by psychics maybe?
So Inferno came out in 1996, which maybe isn’t quite the “early 90s” like I said. It’s not always easy to remember when these flashes-in-the-pan begin and end after you’ve been around for a while. Big f*cking deal.
http://www.att.com/news/0596/960506.chb.html
Maybe if Plan-9 or Inferno had become a de facto standard on x86 hardware rather than Linux, computer science could be advancing into a lot more interesting areas and the industry wouldn’t be stuck with a 30+ year-old OS design and trapped in 1970’s C software development techniques.
No, instead we’d have an unproven 10 year old system with little commercial experience, trapped in a 1970’s C software development techniques.
UNIX had ~10 years in the labs before it started hitting the commercial world hard. Now, it’s got another 20 years in the commercial world, and has managed to survive where several others have struggled and languished, for all sorts of reasons.
Today, we’ve got few popular OSs across platforms (IBM MV, OS/400, OpenVMS, Windows, Unix Clones). Does HP still create new HP3000 machines with MP? (I think I head they has EOLd it) DGs NOVAs? Wang? Burroughs? Prime? Pick? CDC NOS? God knows how many more came and went.
Just about every modern hardware manufacturer is running a UNIX like system. UNIX is now popular because of its ubiquity. It got some really LOUSY services out of the box compared to the other OSes (cron and at for job scheduling? lpd for line printing? Whee!), but in classic “Worse is better” style and in minimalist fashion, it prevails, and nothing seems to be trumping it.
UNIX is dead, long live UNIX.
“…but in classic “Worse is better” style and in minimalist fashion, it prevails, and nothing seems to be trumping it.”
Well said. Sometimes (just like everyone else) I have to remind myself that I should probably be more happy with the stuff that we’ve got now and just getting along with it rather than pining a whole lot about what ‘could have been’. Technology isn’t really about pure aesthetics like mathematics is – it’s more about just getting the job done.
Plan9 may have advanced features, but its window system is as ugly as you would expect from a research OS. I’ve never even been able to try out Plan9, though I’ve wanted to, because my hardware isn’t supported. Its license, when it finally went “Open Source” just didn’t quite hit the mark either, further making it unattractive to people who might want to improve it into something useful for everyone.
>>”I just pictured Linux Nuts having a heart atack when they read he runs NT at work and home. Is this a False picture?”
What does having Ritchie’s choise of operating systems have to do with Linux? Or more generally what does having a person’s operating system choise have to do with other’s people’s operation system choise. Thing about this and please explain your thoughts. Thanks. <<
Because users of most operating systems just go with whatever and don’t care what others use. Linux users, a large chunk of them do go off on what others use. Many of them probably expected him to use linux or maybe freebsd, but at any rate anything other than NT. He is a co-creator of the OS that they use a quasi-clone of. To have the creator of Unix not using it makes you wonder about things. It may make you wonder if it is the end all be all. For Him to use NT is basicly him showing to them it’s not as bad as they try to make it sound. And for many of them, the linux religion types, this causes a conflict with one (some) of their commandments , though shall not use windows even if it does something better, though shall bash windows even for no good reason.
Granted maybe I shouldn’t have Uber-grouped all linux users into one group.
But this case is much like when the pope back in the 40-50’s said evolution was right, sorta undermines a lot of peoples beliefs so they just started to ignore the pope even the the pope stands at(near) the top of what they belive. Some linux users will just ignore him now thinking he has lost his mind .
My take, new technology, regarding computer OS’s at least, never gets widespread use when it first appears, it takes a period of ~20 years for it to start getting adopted outside research circles and universities, no mather how good, groundbreaking or ignovative it can be. It is a trend, look at unix itself, look at microkernel designs, there are other examples as well. I for one belive that some day, things like plan9 will follow unix’s path to aceptance, but it will take time, it will be unforced, as a natural flow, not because of people’s complains. It will happen when people start saying it’s old stuff compared with the new technology created for that time. Same happening today with unix/linux, and by then, no one will care about licence problems or ownership because the need for better things will bypass these problems. I think the time will come when plan9, the forgotten OS of the 80/90 will be the linux/bussword of the moment. I might be grown, but this is what I think.
Escuse my english