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On the shoulders of giants

Deepa Kurup

This August, it is 40 years since Unix took the computing world by storm

It altered computing by allowing for time-sharing
It floated the idea of an open source way of life

— photo: Dennis Ritchie’s Homepage

UNIX developers Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis M. Ritchie in front of a PDP-1, a 16-bit minicomputer, in 1972.

BANGALORE: A few weeks after the “giant leap for mankind” was accomplished, two hackers sat down to spend the summer writing code. In four weeks, Ken Thomson and Dennis Ritchie developed a new operating system named Unix, which was as historic, and which soon evolved to be a cornerstone for the digital age.

This operating system, created at Bell Laboratories, altered computing by allowing for time-sharing on a system. More importantly, by not locking it up and licensing it freely, it floated the idea of an open source way of life. It was on the shoulders of these giants that countless hackers helped to evolve this simple operating system into one that runs servers and workstations worldwide.

While Unix took computing circles by storm, its ‘free access’ led to a flurry of development, and on the flip side, culminated in the Unix wars. Unix ‘forked’ after the University of Berkeley modified and released it as Free Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix. Numerous variants sprang up. Since each took code and modified it without integrating it into the original (as mandated by GNU Public Licensing that came later), all interoperability was lost, explains S. Ramakrishnan, executive director-general of CDAC-India.

In India, Unix was restricted to academic institutions for the longest time. When digitisation came, the market was flooded with foreign non-proprietary products offering expensive and often antiquated solutions. Mr. Ramakrishnan says the “Unix highlight” was that in 1986, the Department of Electronics directed — as per the RBI-constituted Rangarajan Committee’s recommendation — banks to use Unix-based banking solutions. “This reduced cost, as many local companies entered the market [as it was open source], and it also helped national banks withstand the competition when private banks came in,” he points out.

K. Gopinath, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science, points out that small manufacturers like HCL, Wipro and Org, adopted Unix and built their own systems. “In the mid-nineties, however, proprietary OS vendor Microsoft became stronger and these firms dropped Unix in favour of MS. Interestingly, as Unix started dying, Linux started coming up.”

In academic departments, Unix was fundamental when the Web first came in. In 1993, the Linux kernel and the GNU system (of the Free Software Foundation) appeared, followed shortly by the Web. “Now, machines that run on the DOS or Win3.1 operating systems were a serious liability as networking wasn’t part of these systems.” But by the early 1994, the Web could be run on Unix machines or Win3.1machines.

Srinivasan Ramani, a faculty member of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, remembers the day he purchased a copy of the free Berkeley Software Distribution (sometimes called Berkeley Unix) for $70 or so while at the National Centre for Software Technology, Bombay. “The beauty was that it was something you could not only execute but also understand its internals and modify.” It came with the source code, documentation and all, for nominal handling charges.

Along with this bundle came the software for implementing the TCP/IP protocol, now the Internet protocol that lies at the heart of the Internet. This was in 1985, and it was fairly early in India, while the world was waging what was called the protocol wars. Unix was the rage in India before personal computers arrived. “Though there is a big room for Unix even now, I moved on to the PC for its simple user interface,” Mr. Ramani says.

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