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July 21, 2004

UNIX and C all thanks to regulation?

When George W. Bush goes on and on about how government shouldn't stifle corporate interests, and Republicans in congress move to extended copyrights even longer on everything from mix tapes to fairytales, here is a sobering reminder that if it weren't for government regulation and government imposition on a private company to make it's copyrighted work publicly available, we might all still be writing code in Fortran. Well, maybe not, but we might just be starting to talk about this "radical" technology called the internet.

Unix's founding fathers

Another factor helped the duo of C and Unix to spread much faster than they otherwise would have. AT&T was required under the terms of a 1958 court order in an antitrust case to license its non-telephone-related technology to anyone who asked. And so Unix and C were distributed, mostly to universities, for only a nominal fee. When one considers the ineptness of AT&T's later attempts to commercialise Unix—after the court order ceased to be applicable because of another antitrust case which broke up AT&T in 1984—this restriction, an accidental boost to what would later become known as the open-source movement, becomes even more crucial.

The later history of Unix is convoluted, and indeed has again become mired in court battles. Following its origins at Bell Labs, a competing version sprang up at the University of California, Berkeley, which first released its version of Unix in 1977, under the leadership of a graduate student named Bill Joy, who later went on to found Sun Microsystems. Ideological battles raged between adherents of the two versions of Unix through much of the 1980s.

To an extent, this rivalry was stripped of relevance by an unexpected entrant. In 1991, an obscure university student in Finland, Linus Torvalds, announced a project to write a new, open-source clone of Unix from scratch—what has come to be known as Linux. That someone would seek to do this is a testament to the high regard in which programmers hold the achievement of the Bell Labs group. Dr Ritchie, in return, expresses a high regard for Linux, attributing its success to the fact that it was a unified effort, at a time when other competing versions of Unix were mired in legal battles.

Linux is also the true heir of the Unix tradition in the sense that its development process is collaborative. Dr Pike says that the thing he misses most from the 1970s at Bell Labs was the terminal room. Because computers were rare at the time, people did not have them on their desks, but rather went to the room, one side of which was covered with whiteboards, and sat down at a random computer to work. The technical hub of the system became the social hub.

It is that interplay between the technical and the social that gives both C and Unix their legendary status. Programmers love them because they are powerful, and they are powerful because programmers love them. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, perhaps put it best when he said, “Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.” Dr Ritchie's creations are indeed beautiful examples of that most modern of art forms.

Posted by Mike at July 21, 2004 01:30 PM

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