UNIX LINUX

During the 1980’s Ed worked on several systems running variations of UNIX. In fact the IBM XT computers he maintained ran ZENIX a UNIX step child not DOS. UNIX maintains a special place in ED’s heart. in 1987 Ed attended certification training on the AT&T 3B15 computer system. As part of this training he was required too take a UNIX Administrators course offered through AT&T. Ed and another student who attended with him were already familiar with UNIX having been using it for years so became the thorn in the side of their instructor. That said not only did Ed enjoy the class he got a lot out of it. Let it be said, never send a true geek to an operators course. In the 1990’s Ed completed training for Novell Certification on their short lived UNIXWARE. Ed then proceeded to teach UNIX classes for a local computer learning center

A quick history of UNIX

In the 1960’s Dennis Richie and Kennith Thompson two employees of Bell Laboratories wanted to play a computer game. Sadly due to the high cost of computer time about $100 an hour it was cost prohibitive. Looking for an answer they located an old DEC PDP-8 computer in the basement of Bell Laboratories and proceeded to write an operating system that would allow them to run their game. At the time, AT&T the owners of Bell Laboratories was not interested in selling an operating system instead they licensed the code to others such as Berkeley University allowing them to freely use, distribute and modify as they saw fit. This in turn lead to hundreds of flavors of UNIX/LINUX that we see today.

Few people today are familiar with either Dennis Richie or Ken Thompson yet their contribution to the future of Computers is at least as important as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Dennis Richie is the father of “C” programming. Without his contribution there would be no Windows, The foundation of today’s Apple and Microsoft platforms. Dennis passed away the same year as Steve Jobs but few in the computer world even took notice of his passing.

The UNIX Heritage Society provides a great UNIX resource site.

A collection of programs for UNIX/LINUX computers