To Free or Not to Free the Code in Question
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Part I - Capital drawing on public research 0000-1865-1945-1965-1973 1/2 - Demand. Key to understanding *nix programming culture, around the existence of UNIX, are the economic reasons 'why it was born'. "UNIX is plural. It is not one operating system but, many implementations of an idea that orginated in 1965." [The History of Solaris Bill Calkins Solaris 8 System Administrator Guide]. Separated from operating systems, 'computers' do no work, just as thought and reflex give sign of life to the human model. As numerators, each manage value. The process tool is symbolic abstraction. This is counting's tale of refinement, towards natural complexity. The target is operational simplicity. Value's accumulation drives history. Ancestral Unix came from use of the transatlantic telegraph cables laid from 1858, and efforts to make the connection stable and secure from 1865. The dot-dash short-long Morse signal was the first electronic binary language code. A communications war of economies underwrote the succession of imperial Britain by US hegemony, but with the cable providing "a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilisation, liberty, and law throughout the world". [President James Buchanan Wikipedia]. The industrial revolution included specialised mathematical equipment, to supercede raw brainpower: "take mans vaunted power of calculation. Have we not engines which can do all manner of sums more quickly and correctly than we can? ..wherever precision is required man flies to the machine at once, as far preferable to himself. Our sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our looms a stitch; the machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary; it is clear-headed and collected, when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when man must sleep or drop; ever at its post, ever ready for work, its alacrity never flags, its patience never gives in; its might is stronger than combined hundreds, and swifter than the flight of birds". [Samuel Butler Erewhon 1872 Ch.24 Bibliomania]. The processes of human displacement were greatly accelerating, though neither unobserved nor exclusive to greater Britain. Early, Second World War computers were celebrity personalities, individually programmed using switches and lights for input and output (I/O). Manufacturing began in Great Britain's defence, at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, for Station X at Bletchley Park. 'Colossus' Mark I and ten Mark IIs served from late 1943. A year earlier, Prime Minister Churchill sent computer theorist, designer, and debugging ace 'Prof' Alan Turing (PhD Princeton; Logic, algebra, number theory; age 30) as "scientific ambassador to the USA". Sharing knowledge by technology transfer and seeding process visualisation in dynamic telecommunication, Turing's five-month mission helped equip the US "for deciphering the U-boat Enigma" via National Cash Register Corp. (NCR)'s Dayton Ohio plant, and connected "the secret speech encipherment system that was being built at Bell Laboratories in New York for high-level transatlantic communication". Alan Turing pioneered stored programs and insight into the 'universal machine'. His tragic, Cold War death left the free world with inestimable unpaid debt. [World Wanderer: Kenya to Bletchley Park to New Zealand, Catherine M. Caughey, Auckland 1996, p.164; Alan Turing as transatlantic link, 1942 onwards and Alan Turing: the Enigma. More, Turing Archive for the History of Computing AlanTuring.net]. Post-war, Britain's resource depletion and Bletchley project secrecy slowed industrial computing takeoff, from the University of Manchester (Baby 1948, Mark I / Feranti Star 1949, and Mercury "the world's first commercial programmable computers"; Turing), and London's National Physical Laboratory (NPL, Automatic Computing Engine, ACE Pilot Model 1950, production version DEUCE "built by the English Electric Company"; Turing). The Lyons Electronic Office (LEO I) "ran its first business application in 1951. The computer modeled closely on the Cambridge EDSAC, was the first computer in the world that was used for commercial business applications", etc. It is commerce, and threats to it, that drive computing. [Dr.G.E.(Tommy)Thomas & Recollections; Turing's Automatic Computing Engine; Early computers Wikipedia; The Birth of a Computer James H Wilkinson interview 1984]. United States (US/A) industrial strength won: International Business Machines (IBM, Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, ASCC Mark I 1944, "Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator.. [and] the company's first large-scale digital calculating machine, the successful 604 Electronic Calculating Punch" 1948, "Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator.. the first IBM product designed specifically for computation centers" 1949); Mauchly and Eckert (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator, ENIAC 1946) and Electronic Control Co. (Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. to Remington-Rand, "the first large-scale manufacturer of computers" 1950, Universal Automatic Computer UNIVAC for the Bureau of Census 1951); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Digital Computer Laboratory aviation, Jay Forrester, Whirlwind I 1949); Computer Research Corp. (CRC aviation, to NCR 1952); Burroughs Corp. (Universal Digital Electronic Computer, UDEC 1953); Radio Corporation of America (RCA, Turing Bizmac 1956); Honeywell (1957); General Electric (GE, NCR 304 "first transistor-based computer" 1957); Control Data Corp. (CDC, "the first fully transistorized supercomputer", Seymour Cray 1958); Digital Electronics Corp. (DEC 1960); etc.; competed with Germany (Zuse KG 1950, Nixdorf Computer 1952) and Japan (Nippon Electric Co., NEC 1958), as well as with England. [A Chronology of Computer History, HCS; etc.]. Systems for programming's reproduction were thus developed. But each OS was still unique to each model of computer - until IBM's OS/360 of 1964 - and they did not communicate. Yet a greater inefficiency was identified first. With large, expensive mainframes still relatively scarce, it was essential that they be made to 'multitask', and accept multiple jobs from multiple current users (instead of batch sequences). Such was the Multics project moment, of 1965. MIT's importance - in both computing history and its academic tradition - is insufficiently recognised, due to the enormity of consequent US west coast events. The MIT Computation Center started work on a Compatible Timesharing System (CTSS) in 1961. With D/ARPA backing in 1962 ([Defense] Advanced Research Projects Agency www.darpa.mil now locked down; formed in response to the 1957 Sputnik Russian satellite; History of ARPANET; Knowledge Sharing Effort), this became Project MAC (Multiple Access Computers). Progressing, a Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (Multics) contract was "sent out to bid in 1963". [Multics, History]. General Electric won with the GE-645 mainframe computer, beating IBM and DEC, in 1964. Commercial weight was being drawn in behind the pubic sector initiative, awaiting the key player.. |
The American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T or 'Ma Bell') was "the world's biggest company and largest private telephone system", until broken up by the US Justice Department. Antitrust law had its roots in countering communications technology monopolist power, being used against the railways, Standard Oil, IBM in 1952-56 "for monopolizing the punched-card accounting machine industry.. [the] consent decree require[d] IBM to sell as well as lease machines" and 1969-82 (case dropped), and most recently, against Microsoft Corporation over OS web browser bundling.[What Killed Ma Bell?, AT&T Divestiture, Bell System Memorial; HCS Chronology; The US DoJ emerged as the largest BSD implementation site - see Part II]. In 1934, AT&T owned "four out of every five telephones in the country, its long distance network [held] together the country's telephone system and nearly every major city [was] served by a Bell telephone company". So the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was founded to control the giant. [Time Line, Bell System Memorial]. Without this restraint, commercial computing would have moved even quicker; Bell's George Stibitz had built "the first binary calculator" in 1937, and "demonstrate[d] the Complex Number Calculator, which may be the first digital computer", in 1940. [HCS Chronology]. 1952 saw "joint AT&T-BPO meetings at Dollis Hill lab to begin [a] transatlantic cable project" that finished four years later, via Canada. But in 1956 AT&T were barred from "any business other than provision of common carrier communications services - it was thus excluded from the computer industry in the US.. AT&T was also required to license Bell [Laboratories] patents to any applicant in exchange for royalties", thus forming the pattern by which UNIX would later be distributed. AT&T prospered as a "regulated natural monopoly", but its massive bureaucracy fell, as, "in the 1960s, a number of serious problems developed which AT&T was not equipped to solve under the old status." [Telegraph & Radio Timeline, Netvalley; Time Line, BSM; What Killed Ma Bell?, BSM]. The post-war economic boom was peaking, and federal government had monopoly capital square in its sights yet again. AT&T was filtering its monolithic service structure, and finding high-value assets to abstract, retain, and reprofit from. These were technology patents. The Multics project was attractive because AT&T's patent office lacked a management system for its expansive 'intellectual property' base. The historic link between burgeoning, commoditised data flow, computer processing power, and software invention title rights had truly begun. Commercial interest needed only to wrest development leadership from the public sector, which dated back before Harvard and ENIAC. In 1965, the project four years in the making took commercial force. Bell Technology Labs (BTL) had joined the Multics research train in 1964, and Bell's purchase of the GE-645 mainframe now completed the development "Trinity", of MIT, GE and BTL. This was the moment of UNIX conception, contrary to 'Unix lore' which downplays the role of MIT and hails 1969, for material reasons. With the programming skills gained from MIT starting 1965, AT&T became secure, long-term, digital telecommunications players. But the debt of their operating system title to public service academic research, MIT, and to Multics, is infinite. [Multics, History; 1965 also saw: US entry into the Vietnam War and consequent draft protests; the first USSR and US space walks; assassination of Malcolm X, civil rights marches, the Voting Rights Act and Watts Riots; the Social Security Act; Freedom Flights from Cuba; UK-US oil embargo against Rhodesia - Wikipedia]. The Multics project - very typical of IT - overran time and budget. It then forked, or split, as thereafter would become a norm from what became the world's most flexible software platform. Multics, badly overdue, went into paid service at MIT in October 1969, though Bell had withdrawn in April. Multics first sold to Rome Air Development Center, at Griffiss Air Force Base in New York state, in August 1970 - the year "GE sold its computer business to Honeywell". [ibid.]. Proprietary software had been inaugurated. It would then compete, but not forever alone. Project MAC and Multics did formalise informal tradition. The MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab ('The Lab') was becoming home to a 17-year-old advanced trainee programmer called Richard Stallman. The Lab "inculcated Stallman in the ethical traditions of the 'hacker ethic.' To be a hacker meant more than just writing programs, Stallman learned. It meant writing the best possible programs. It meant sitting at a terminal for 36 hours straight if that's what it took to write the best possible programs. Most importantly, it meant having access to the best possible machines and the most useful information at all times. Hackers spoke openly about changing the world through software, and Stallman learned the instinctual hacker disdain for any obstacle that prevented a hacker from fulfilling this noble cause. Chief among these obstacles were poor software, academic bureaucracy, and selfish behavior." [Impeach God "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 4, Sam Williams, O'Reilly 2002]. Bell Labs had gone their own way, but their retrenched OS work continued unofficially in 1969, under Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, J.F. Ossanna, M.D. 'Doug' McIlroy, et. al., moving to a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer - a forced but formative hardware economy. With "a somewhat treacherous pun on 'Multics'", Brian Kernighan coined UNICS (UNiplexed Information and Computing Service). Dodging the 'Eunics' counter-pun of an emasculated Multics, the name UNIX was morphed in 1970 (under uNixon's presidency). The work coincided with initiation of ARPANET, as the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute became the first nodes, also in 1969 - the year of NASA's first moon landing. This was the beginning of a major and problematic rift in the programming community, that was an industrial west-coast versus east-coast split. Unix and the US computing development lead would go west, for the long term, as the nation's cultural centre of gravity shifted - to California. Aerospace industry favoured the warm dry climate there. In New Jersey, for "the last half of 1971, [Thompson's team] supported three typists from the Patent department, who spent the day busily typing, editing, and formatting patent applications" using roff text processing on a PDP-11 and UNIX. Support for the mult/unics project had been rescued, and this was its baptism. Ritchie turned the B programming language into C in 1971 too, and Thompson's aborted effort that year to rewrite UNIX in C was achieved, including the OS kernel and everything but the assembler, in 1973. Which was when AT&T first sold and licensed Unix, to the US Defense Department only - the essential cash contract, wrested from MIT. [The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System D Ritchie; the first oil shock hit 1973-74]. To the victor go the spoils: UNIX achieved fame, success, the lion's share of exegesis, and justly so. The combined use of high-level programming language and minicomputers was historic innovation and dramatic progress. UNIX had matured as code-accessible and the inaugural, successful software product. It would rapidly diversify into various 'Unices', popular with research and business, and be crowned the default minicomputer OS. Multics had limited commercial success, so was cancelled by Honeywell in July 1985 and fully decommissioned on 30 October 2000. Its mainframe dinosaur base was steadily outmoded. Most important of all, UNIX had been designed for portability across diverse computer platforms. [Draft 03Sep05 - to be cont'd..] |