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History Of Unix
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but also had many problems. Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics – among them Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna – decided to redo the work, but on a much smaller scale. APDF/ref> In 1979, Ritchie described the group's vision for Unix: 1960s In the late 1960s, Bell Labs was involved in a project with MIT and General Electric to develop a time-sharing system, called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (Multics), allowing multiple users to access a mainframe simultaneously. Dissatisfied with the project's progress, Bell Labs management ultimately ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley ( BSD), Microsoft ( Xenix), Sun Microsystems ( SunOS/ Solaris), HP/ HPE ( HP-UX), and IBM ( AIX). In the early 1990s, AT&T sold its rights in Unix to Novell, which then sold the UNIX trademark to The Open Group, an industry consortium founded in 1996. The Open Group allows the use of the mark for certified operating systems that comply with the Single UNIX Specification (SUS). Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the " Unix philosophy". According to thi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proprietary Software
Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting his or her freedoms. It is often contrasted with open-source or free software. For this reason, it is also known as non-free software or closed-source software. Types Origin Until the late 1960s computers—large and expensive mainframe computers, machines in specially air-conditioned computer rooms—were usually leased to customers rather than sold. Service and all software available were usually supplied by manufacturers without separate charge until 1969. Computer ven ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. The company produced many different product lines over its history. It is best known for the work in the minicomputer market starting in the mid-1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis in history. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through the 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Space Travel (video Game)
''Space Travel'' is an early video game developed by Ken Thompson in 1969 that simulates travel in the Solar System. The player flies their ship around a two-dimensional scale model of the Solar System with no objectives other than to attempt to land on various planets and moons. The player can move and turn the ship, and adjust the overall speed by adjusting the scale of the simulation. The ship is affected by the single strongest gravitational pull of the astronomical bodies. The game was developed at Bell Labs before the rise of the commercial video game industry in the early history of video games, and was ported during 1969 from the Multics operating system to the GECOS operating system on the GE 635 computer, and then to the PDP-7 computer. As a part of porting the game to the PDP-7, Thompson developed his own operating system, which later formed the core of the Unix operating system. ''Space Travel'' never spread beyond Bell Labs or had an effect on future games, leav ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mainframe Computer
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing. A mainframe computer is large but not as large as a supercomputer and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers. The term ''mainframe'' was derived from the large cabinet, called a ''main frame'', that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early computers. Later, the term ''mainframe'' was used to distinguish high-end commercial computers from less powerful machines. Design Modern mainframe design is characterized less by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Keypunch
A keypunch is a device for precisely punching holes into stiff paper cards at specific locations as determined by keys struck by a human operator. Other devices included here for that same function include the gang punch, the pantograph punch, and the stamp. The term was also used for similar machines used by humans to transcribe data onto punched tape media. For Jacquard looms, the resulting punched cards were joined together to form a paper tape, called a "chain", containing a program that, when read by a loom, directed its operation.Bell, T.F. (1895) '' Jacquard Weaving and Designing'', Longmans, Green And Co. For Hollerith machines and other unit record machines the resulting punched cards contained data to be processed by those machines. For computers equipped with a punched card input/output device the resulting punched cards were either data or programs directing the computer's operation. Early Hollerith keypunches were manual devices. Later keypunches were electrom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and predated the use of a computer screen by decades. Early terminals were inexpensive devices but very slow compared to punched cards or paper tape for input, yet as the technology improved and video displays were introduced, terminals pushed these older forms of interaction from the industry. A related development was time-sharing systems, which evolved in parallel and made up for any inefficiencies in the user's typing ability with the ability to support multiple users on the same machine, each at their own terminal or terminals. The function of a terminal is typically confined to transcription and input of data; a device with significant local, programmable data-processing capability may be called a "smart terminal" or fat client. A t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Programming
Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as analysis, generating algorithms, profiling algorithms' accuracy and resource consumption, and the implementation of algorithms (usually in a chosen programming language, commonly referred to as coding). The source code of a program is written in one or more languages that are intelligible to programmers, rather than machine code, which is directly executed by the central processing unit. The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate the performance of a task (which can be as complex as an operating system) on a computer, often for solving a given problem. Proficient programming thus usually requires expertise in several different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ken Thompson
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go programming language. Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle. He won the Turing Award in 1983 with his long-term colleague Dennis Ritchie. Early life and education Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. When asked how he learned to program, Thompson stated, "I was always fascinated with logic an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GE-600 Series
The GE-600 series was a family of 36-bit mainframe computers originating in the 1960s, built by General Electric (GE). When GE left the mainframe business the line was sold to Honeywell, which built similar systems into the 1990s as the division moved to Groupe Bull and then NEC. The system is perhaps best known as the hardware used by the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) and the Multics operating system. Multics was supported by virtual memory additions made to later versions of the series. Architecture The 600 series used 36-bit words and 18-bit addresses. They had two 36-bit accumulators, eight 18-bit index registers, and one 8-bit exponent register. It supported floating point in both 36-bit single-precision and 2 x 36-bit double precision, the exponent being stored separately, allowing up to 71 bits of precision and one bit being used for the sign. It had an elaborate set of addressing modes, many of which used indirect words, some of which were auto-incrementing o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multics
Multics ("Multiplexed Information and Computing Service") is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory.Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, 1984, pp. 365-375. Nathan Gregory writes that Multics "has influenced all modern operating systems since, from microcomputers to mainframes." Initial planning and development for Multics started in 1964, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Originally it was a cooperative project led by MIT (Project MAC with Fernando Corbató) along with General Electric and Bell Labs. It was developed on the GE 645 computer, which was specially designed for it; the first one was delivered to MIT in January 1967. GE offered their earlier 635 systems with an early timesharing system known as "Mark I" and intended to offer the 645 with Multics as a larger successor. Bell withdrew from the project in 1969 as it became clear it would not deliver a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Time-sharing
In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s represented a major technological shift in the history of computing. By allowing many users to interact concurrently with a single computer, time-sharing dramatically lowered the cost of providing computing capability, made it possible for individuals and organizations to use a computer without owning one, and promoted the interactive use of computers and the development of new interactive applications. History Batch processing The earliest computers were extremely expensive devices, and very slow in comparison to later models. Machines were typically dedicated to a particular set of tasks and operated by control panels, the operator manually entering small programs via switches in order ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
