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 ...

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 ...

If you use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, ...

Early Sunday morning in Greenwich, England, the clock that keeps Universal Time will strike 01:46:40 -- the 40th second of the 46th minute in the second hour of Sept. 9, 2001. That instant will be an ...

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.

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.

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 ...

Whoever said the first casualty of war is truth would be surprised to find that apothegm quoted in a dispute between systems vendors. But it is an apt description of current events. The SCO Group has ...