“Daddy, what are clouds made of?” , “Mostly Linux servers, son”

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.

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.

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.

"just a hobby, won't be big and professional" Little did Linus Torvalds know, his creation will run the world

GNU: GNU's Not Unix Linux: Linux Is Not Unix Unix: Everybody hates me...

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.

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!

I’ve worked in the IT industry for 20 years and nobody has explained UNIX like you have! Thank you!

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.

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.

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.

One of the best bite-sized explanations out there, well done Sir.

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! :)

This is a great explanation. The depth you went into on the history really made everything very clear. Thank you.

Thank you Gary for the history insight of "Unix vs Linux" .. very well presented, super comments as well .. cheers ..!!

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.

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 Gary for taking the time to make this. A thumbs up 👍

One of the best, concise overviews I've ever seen in 25 years. Outstanding!

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!

this is great explanation, best i have heard yet. thanks

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.

That backgammon example was badass. Kudos for the vid

*GARY!!!* *Afternoon Professor!!!* Keep them coming ... I'm gonna keep watching and learning!

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

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.

Jurassic Park was run on a Unix system.

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.

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.

these kinds of videos of the history of programming languages and computers are phenominal, thanks for making them!

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.

Wow..thanks for the lesson..😁😁😁👍👍👍👍

Greatly appreciated the history and perspective!

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.

covered pretty much everything.... Using Linux when i got my first PC... Great information and great video

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.

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

Great thorough and quick presentation! I had no idea.

Great video, been a Linux user for 20 years and enjoyed the history lesson.

I lived through most of this, started using Ultrix in the early 80's. I work at Google now. Accurate summary.

Great summary hitting some very interesting and key highlights. I enjoyed the video!

Great explanation! Best video on this topic.

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.

Core Summary : 12:54 Thanks a ton Gary for telling the whole history and clearing the doubt on Linux vs Unix :)

Gary, you are the best. I love your reviews man !!

Thanks for a very clear explanation about the history of these OSs :)

Thanks For accepting our requests and making this video🔥♥️♥️

That was fun. I'm an old timer that used Unix SVr4 at AT&T and rode that whole mutation train to today.

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.

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 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.

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 ...).

Thanks Gary, always a pleasure to follow one of your "classes" 😉

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

It was refreshing to go over the history again. Thanks, Gary!

Started life 30 years ago with BSD 4.3 Tahoe on the Tahoe architecture.

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

Been looking for this kind of explanation. Thanks!

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.

It’s crazy how C is still widely used today and one of the best programming languages for imbedded systems, game programming, and more.

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!

Always awesome content Gary! Love your videos

Took me all the way until the end of the video to realize that he's wearing a Red Hat red hat

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.

VERY helpful/informative , many thanks !

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.

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.

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

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.

Great video. Thanks for explaining, Gary.

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.

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 ?

Wow Gary - the best video explaining this complicated history. Well done.

Congrats for your lesson. As a brazilian who badly speak english, i could understant with ease everything you said. Thanks!

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....

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)!

Really enjoyed this viedos. Very intersting. Thank you for sharing you knowledge :)

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 UKposts video. Thank you very much !

So much information in a nutshell!! How long have you worked on this video sir?

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

Thank you for the clear and condensed information.

Very well done. Thank you for the superb explanation.

Unix history has something mythical and mystical to it, it's like the OS hero of the computer Odyssey.

sir Gary where have you been educative video thank you sir Gary

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).

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

IT’S A UNIX SYSTEM!, I KNOW THIS!

Excellent lecture. I very much enjoyed it. Also Richard Stallman would probably want to have a serious word with you about the implications of the word philosophy in the way you used it.

thank you for the video, best one I could find!

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

Could you do a FreeBSD vs OpenBSD vs NetBSD? Best regards and thanks for all your great videos!

great video, thanks for your time and explanation

I lived through this history and you are spot on. Thanks for this video.

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.

I'm a developer who uses Linux on development pc and server for over 20 years...Never quite understood the difference between unix, gnu and linux. Thank you for explaining!

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

Thank you Gary for the knowledge share... I have become a big fan of you.