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The Earliest Unix Code: An Anniversary Source Code Release (https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-earliest-unix-code-an-anniversary-source-code-release/)
What is it that runs the servers that hold our online world, be it the web or the cloud? What enables the mobile apps that are at the center of increasingly on-demand lives in the developed world and of mobile banking and messaging in the developing world? The answer is the operating system Unix and its many descendants: Linux, Android, BSD Unix, MacOS, iOS—the list goes on and on. Want to glimpse the Unix in your Mac? Open a Terminal window and enter “man roff” to view the Unix manual entry for an early text formatting program that lives within your operating system.
2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Unix. In the summer of 1969, that same summer that saw humankind’s first steps on the surface of the Moon, computer scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories—most centrally Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—began the construction of a new operating system, using a then-aging DEC PDP-7 computer at the labs.
This man sent the first online message 50 years ago (https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-oct-29-2019-1.5339212/this-man-sent-the-first-online-message-50-years-ago-he-s-since-seen-the-web-s-dark-side-emerge-1.5339244)
As many of you have heard in the past, the first online message ever sent between two computers was "lo", just over 50 years ago, on Oct. 29, 1969.
It was supposed to say "log," but the computer sending the message — based at UCLA — crashed before the letter "g" was typed. A computer at Stanford 560 kilometres away was supposed to fill in the remaining characters "in," as in "log in."
The CBC Radio show, “The Current” has a half-hour interview with the man who sent that message, Leonard Kleinrock, distinguished professor of computer science at UCLA
"The idea of the network was you could sit at one computer, log on through the network to a remote computer and use its services there,"
50 years later, the internet has become so ubiquitous that it has almost been rendered invisible. There's hardly an aspect in our daily lives that hasn't been touched and transformed by it.
Q: Take us back to that day 50 years ago. Did you have the sense that this was going to be something you'd be talking about a half a century later?
A: Well, yes and no. Four months before that message was sent, there was a press release that came out of UCLA in which it quotes me as describing what my vision for this network would become. Basically what it said is that this network would be always on, always available. Anybody with any device could get on at anytime from any location, and it would be invisible.
Well, what I missed ... was that this is going to become a social network. People talking to people. Not computers talking to computers, but [the] human element.
Q: Can you briefly explain what you were working on in that lab? Why were you trying to get computers to actually talk to one another?
A: As an MIT graduate student, years before, I recognized I was surrounded by computers and I realized there was no effective [or efficient] way for them to communicate. I did my dissertation, my research, on establishing a mathematical theory of how these networks would work. But there was no such network existing. AT&T said it won't work and, even if it does, we want nothing to do with it.
So I had to wait around for years until the Advanced Research Projects Agency within the Department of Defence decided they needed a network to connect together the computer scientists they were supervising and supporting.
Q: For all the promise of the internet, it has also developed some dark sides that I'm guessing pioneers like yourselves never anticipated.
A: We did not. I