Any good videos or resources on the eraly history of Unix & Linux?

Posted by amogusdevilman@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 16 comments

I've been watching EzeeLinux on youtube and he often mentions bits and pieces about how unix used to work, which made me really curious, like the fact it was used in universities, how groups were used for permissions for several users, and so on.

It made me really curious to know how early unix systems were set up, what the hard drive sizes were like, and wether they used several drives to set up the partitions we usually set in just one nowadays, and just curiosity in general to know how things worked and how unix was used

Anyone got any talk, conferences, videos, resources, on the history of unix and how it was used? Contextualized info explaining not just what unix was but how it was set up, the hardware and situations it was used in, who were the main users, etc...

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First_Result_1166@reddit

"used to work"? Thanks, now I'm feeling old.

Obviously, you have no experience in running a multi-user environment.

\~25 yrs ago. Solaris workstations in the SparcStation4-Ultra1 range. Disk quota at maybe \~25MB for $HOME, which sounds awful by todays standards. But you know where each file comes from, what it's used for. No full-blown desktop environments. A window manager manages.. well, windows. And it uses a simple, text-based configuration file. Easy to understand, easy to modify. You're in control.

Software is more or less portable, from UNIX to BSD to Linux. People develop with portability in mind. Nowadays, not so much. Thank you, systemd, dbus, etc.. F*ck you, flatpak/snap.

$NOW: Using fvwm as a window manager as I type this. No Gnome, no KDE, and no wayland either. Give the "old stuff" a chance, a lot of effort went into these.

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kidz94@reddit

I disagree. Old stuff is gatekept by greybeards. X11 and vim are best examples.

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First_Result_1166@reddit

How would one gatekeep open-source software with a free license? Feel free to fork and come up with something better, then.

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amogusdevilman@reddit (OP)

Is it possible to still set up a multiple user linux system the oldschool way as a test?

I read you need one graphics card per monitor and im not sure how you'd separate apart the keyboard of each user but it would be interesting to know what its like

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SpeedDaemon1969@reddit

I use twm BTW

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NGRhodes@reddit

Unix: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan is a good, if a little sad book.

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/\~bwk/memoir.html

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elatllat@reddit

https://youtu.be/_36yNWw_07g

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BatonRougeSlayer@reddit

Asianometry channel

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jdcarpe@reddit

Here is a really good video about the UNIX operating system and how it came about

https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?si=4KTdujVZRwg3R0Si

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amogusdevilman@reddit (OP)

The way they compare linux "ease of use" because it doesnt require specifing the size and location of a file everytime you want to work with it makes me wonder how awfully primitive other operating systems must have been at the time... Makes me wonder about other filesystems and their directory hierarchy, if they even had directories

Also interesting that they literally call /usr/$username the "Home" directory

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/121258/at-what-point-did-the-home-directory-appear

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