Innovation in software (was RE: IBM loses its Unix license - Jun.16, 2003)

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Joe Pluta wrote:

> > > Maybe you can share some
> > > technological innovations from the Mac/*nix side of the world?
> >
> > The Internet
>
> Maybe.  Here's some interesting history, though.  The original Internet
> started with the ARPANET, which was actually an SDS Sigma 7, an SDS940, a
> DEC PDP-10 and (I love this) an IBM 360.  None were running Unix.

Nod.

> Unix got on board nearly 10 years later, in the late 70's.  Now, you might
> say that Unix helped spur the growth of the Internet, and that I would
> probably grant you.  The ***Internet***.
>
> But not the WorldWide Web.  And the Web is what really brought the Internet
> to the masses; in fact, I doubt that 10% of the people that use the Internet
> even know there's a character-based backbone underneath.
>
> IMHO, prior to the Web, the Internet was primarily IRC chats and other
> murkier business.  In fact, not unlike the IRC is today <grin>.  It was
> MOSAIC, and thus the Web, that brought the Internet to its current
> acceptance, and I would argue it was the Windows version of Mosaic that did
> it, not to mention Netscape and IE.
>
> Now, the issue of innovation is a good one here, and I think you'd have to
> give the nod to Unix for more innovative techniques, where the Windows
> version may have been more adaptive.  I don't know about that; I never used
> x-Mosaic.

It is innovation that is the issue (that's what we were talking about,
right?).  I would disagree that unix helped spur the internet, I think
that by and large unix was and is the internet.  Think about it.  What
until very recently was the largest volume traffic?  email.  Mostly
handled by sendmail or some other unix program.  That is particularly true
in the early days.  DNS?  handled by BIND running mostly on unix.  Web
servers (leaving browsers alone for now)?  NCSA httpd and apache on unix.
IRC, IM, etc. are basically fancy forms of the unix talk program.  FTP?
mostly unix in the early days.  Newsgroups?  Again, mostly unix.  telnet,
ssh, pop (server), whois - all mostly unix.  Why?  That's what was in the
labs at the universities.  Granted there were some DOS, winXX, mainframes,
but these either weren't very useful (i.e. lacked many features) or were
difficult to get time on.  Almost all the interesting things that we do on
the internet were designed and implented first on unix, possibly excepting
routing.

It was mosaic that really launched the WWW, but the WWW wasn't the most
popular form of web traffic for a very long time.  And even so, I was
using mosaic on unix long before I had access to any windows version.  So
I feel that the internet is largely a result of the innovations in unix
(though magnified greatly by the merging of the innovations into other
OSes).

On the topic of innovation, there are other areas where I feel unix has
really innovated and others have copied.  I worked for some years at
Hansen Planetarium, a small-ish planetarium in Utah.  But we had a great
partnership with Evans and Sutherland.  Those guys made among other things
fantastic visualizations of space, stars, and galaxies.  They also
installed a flight simulator which was so realistic and powerful as to be
almost dangerous to the audience who became quite disoriented.  The
hardware involved was quite complex for the star projector and the flight
simulator required complex coordination between many projectors.
Everything could be controlled by a joystick.  The entire system ran on
unix - the star projector on a Sun Sparc 10 and the flight simulator on a
couple of red hat boxes.  These people really were doing new things with
computers that had never been done before - i.e. innovation (we got the
monkey version of their real flight simulators they made for the gov't).

Or how about SGI?  OpenGL is a gaming and 3D standard on pretty much every
machine that does graphics.  OpenGL was developed originally by SGI on
unix (IRIX actually).  DirectX came out many years later.  SGI defined 3D
computing.  Innovation.

I don't claim that innovation has been unique to unix.  Indeed, the story
of the PDP-10 and PDP-11 is very interesting.  I used to study electronic
music under Tracy Petersen, a pioneer in early electronic music.  He used
a PDP-10 and PDP-11 to make much of the first electronic music and music
research.  He and those around him (whose names I am forgetting now)
pretty much figured out digital audio.

Futhermore many times innovation happens on two platforms simutaneously.
For example, Cray, Sequent, SGI, and IBM all have worked on really big
machines throughout their history and developed many innovative techniques
to handle the challeges those machines present (sometimes by buying the
other company, i.e. IBM-Sequent and SGI-Cray).  Because of this we have
mainframes and supercomputers.  Each developed differently but both
innovative, even though both end up being basically the same
thing:  enormous machines.

But perhaps the most interesting innovation that we have seen has been the
innovation of free software.  Free software mostly happened and happens on
unix.  And free software is not only a development innovation, it is on OS
innovation.  How many systems feature XFS, JFS, reiserfs, and ext3, all
different types of journalling filesystems?  Only one:  linux.  The
innovation of the development has lead to innovation of the OS - something
that has never been done before.  Free software is perhaps the greatest
innovation we have yet seen.  Not because the software we have is the
greatest ever but because the development allows for the innovation of the
software.  IT is not the software that is valuable, but the possibilities.

Whew!  That was long.  That should make up for the brevity of my previous
response ;^)

James Rich