[Simh] [simh] new paper on history of Unix

John Floren slawmaster at gmail.com
Fri Aug 20 16:23:24 EDT 2010


On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 3:12 PM, Rich Alderson
<simh at alderson.users.panix.com> wrote:
>> Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:01:50 -0700
>> From: Carl Lowenstein <carl.lowenstein at gmail.com>
>
>> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe at math.utah.edu>
>> wrote:
>
>>> This new paper on the history of Unix may be of interest to
>>> some readers; getting the PDF from the DOI may require an
>>> IEEE digital library membership (either personal or institutional):
>
>>>  DOI =          "http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MAHC.2009.55",
>
>>>  abstract =     "Until recently, the earliest versions of the Unix
>>>                 operating system were believed to have been lost
>>>                 completely. In 2008, however, a restoration team from
>>>                 the Unix Heritage Society completed an effort to
>>>                 resurrect and restore the first edition Unix to a
>>>                 running and usable state from a newly discovered
>>>                 listing of the system's assembly source code.",
>
>> This paper as published by Usenix may be the same information.  In any
>> case, it is easier to get a copy.
>
>> http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix09/tech/full_papers/toomey/toomey.pdf
>
> I took at look at the two offerings.  The IEEE page lists all the references
> in that paper, a much longer list than the one that appears at the end of
> the Usenix paper.  I'm not quite ready to shell out $19 for a PDF, so I have
> no other way to judge the contenct, but that tells me that the IEEE paper is
> likely to have a good deal more than the other.
>
>                                                                Rich

Thanks to the wonders of university memberships, I was able to get the
IEEE copy of the paper. It's 3 pages longer and has a much larger
section on the actual history of Unix, comparisons to Multics, etc. It
seems a bit more polished as well.

John
-- 
"With MPI, familiarity breeds contempt. Contempt and nausea. Contempt,
nausea, and fear. Contempt, nausea, fear, and .." -- Ron Minnich



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