Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

UNIX version 4 is quite special on account of being the first UNIX to be written in C instead of PDP-11 ASM, but it was also considered to have been lost to the ravages of time. Joyfully, we can ...

I booted UNIX V4 (first C rewrite) in a PDP‑11 emulator. It feels tactile—no backspace, staggered print, slower typing, and it forced me to slow down. Classic Unix tools (ls, cat, ed, cal, dc) and ...

NetBSD is a real Unix that can run almost anywhere. Can it run as a desktop?

A fascinating little point made in a much longer piece about the smartphone wars. One that makes me wonder whether Unix can now be considered to be the most successful operating system of all time.

With Coreutils for Windows, the same shell commands and scripts should run on Windows, Linux, and WSL. Microsoft relies on ...

Linus Torvalds once said, in reference to the development of Linux, that he “had hoisted [himself] up on the shoulders of giants.” Among those giants, Dennis Ritchie (aka dmr) was likely the tallest.

Commercial enterprise UNIX today reminds me of vintage clothes and furniture. Just when you think certain things have become passé in favor of newer more modern things, they are somehow revived and ...

DIRECTLY west from the southernmost tip of Manhattan, a bit more than 15 miles away, lies the sleepy-looking suburban town of Murray Hill. Just south of the town's centre lies a huge complex of ...