there was a time when UNIX was anoperating system used only by thecomputer elite people working onmainframes like this on Dow 580 which isin fact the world's largest UNIXcomputer system but nowadays UNIX isshowing up on personal computers in factUNIX is running this RadioShack 16b whyall the excitement about UNIX and moreunits become the next ms-dos we'll findout as we take a look at UNIX theoperating system on this edition of thecomputer chroniclesthe computer chronicles is brought toyou in part by mcgraw-hill publishers ofpopular computing magazine featuringmicro computer applications thatincrease productivity for managers andprofessionalswelcome to the computer Chronicles I'mStuart chef a and this is gary kildallGary I told a friend of mine we weredoing a show on UNIX and he said to mewhy in the world would you want tofeature a unit on a computer show themoral of the story is while somecomputer people are talking aboutnothing but UNIX some PC users don'teven know what UNIX is why is there thesudden excitement about Unixwell it shouldn't be a sudden excitementUNIX itself has been around since thelate 60s the problem is that microshaven't had the power to support theyhaven't had the large amount of meanmemory the hard disk the fast processorand so forth but nowadays micros do havethat power and so as UNIX becomes aserious contender for an operatingsystem standard okay the fact manypeople are saying UNIX might become thestandard operating system of the futurebut there are many uses of UNIX going onright now we have a report developed inthe late 1960s at Bell Laboratories UNIXwas later adopted by the University ofCalifornia for academic research andpublishing at Berkeley's history ofscience department typesetting ofjournals and directories is accomplishedfrom start to finish on a network ofUNIX based terminals why Unixwell apart from the fact that a majorversion of UNIX was designed at Berkeleyit's an eminently portable system frommicro too many to mainframe UNIX iseasily adapted with few or no changesrequired the typical UNIX network runson many computers user initiated tasksare distributed among computers throughport selectors but the advantages ofUNIX are not limited to multi-userportability the system is also fast andpowerful once the user is mastered itsunorthodox commands is rewarded withsome very sophisticated features likebackground processing after initiating atask the user can go on to another onewhile the system continues to work onthe first surrounding the kernel of Unixis a shell or central commonand interpreter that redirectsapplication input and output manipulatesfiles and stores command sequences theshell structure unlike the commands isfriendly allowing even the first timeuser to perform complex tasks UNIX usersgive the system high marks for itsversatility get up until now it's beenlargely confined to a small group ofspecialized users it has proven itselfto them now it must prove itself to therest of us let me introduce you now toour first two guests first of all markSobel mark is the author of a bookcalled a practical guide to the UNIXsystem and John Massey John is now withMIPS computer systems used to be withconvergent technologies and used to workon UNIX at Bell Labs Gary a lot ofpeople don't really understand UNIXmaybe you can start by giving us alittle bit of backgroundwell UNIX is a very interesting historyand it really has been come down fromthe mini computer world into microswhere a lot of the micro operatingsystems move themselves up into the highend and they're sort of meeting right inthe middle right now a UNIX carries withit the C language of the UNIX filesystem and the usek in it use it UNIXinterface now the file system itself aswe're talking about here but the Clanguage is wildly successful it's hereright now it's been on a lot ofdifferent operating systems now thequestion about the user interface isstill one that we have to address it'sconsidered unfriendly and mark is goingto show us an example that and how it'smade for a more friendly say with theapplications themselves well first Ithink for people who aren't familiarwith UNIX you have a lot of shortcommands because UNIX was designed formachines for terminals that ran veryslowly teletype and command like thiswill generate a lot of information thatwell these little interpretationokay what you're seeing more and moretoday isapplications being built with interfacesderived from das okay this applicationis called file it and it has a 1 2 thatis 1 2 3 type of interface takes theplace of the typical interface that youwould see it's a standard UNIX rightuser calls up this program or canautomatically just log in and be usingthis program and moves the cursor orthis this highlight by pressing thespacebar and there's built-in help pressctrl W and will tell you where you areand you know what what you can do if youget stuck and return just calls up whatyou so in this case what UNIX does it'sreally the core of the system itprovides the services for this programto get at the file system and so forthbut really itself doesn't talk to theuser exactly it also provided aenvironment for the developers to buildUNIX and unix-like and I think is theidea of portability of software but asyou can move it around to various placesand what John what you have the commentsabout the portability of UNIX itselfyeah that is certain probably the mostimportant area of Unix UNIX started onsome digital equipment machines and hassince been moved to literally 50 or ahundred different kinds of processorsthat's very important because if you'regoing to invest a lot of effort inbuilding software it's real helpful toknow that you can move it around move itfrom anything from personal computersthrough the very largest mainframesmeans you save a lot of your investmentthat's also true for software designersthat's that's certainly true because asoftware designer can then take say alanguage like C and its standard runtimelibrary then you write an applicationfor it and you can not only run on UNIXbut say you run a Doss or conquerindustry limit that's true if I couldactually do that that's how UNIXoriginally got moved was that peoplefound that you could move C programsvery easily it was the environment thatwas difficult to copy and thereforepeople got to move Unixmachines now one of the criticisms ofUNIX has been that it it was unreliableand I think all the UNIX users have haveheard that over and over pit in the pastyears what is the state of it right nowin terms of if we're talking about thecore system of file system you want thatto be very reliable what is the currentstate of that it's actually fairly goodthese days you have to understandoriginally when you got your UNIX systemthe the normal behavior was to find aguru or wizard and chained him to themachine right therefore when the diskbroke he would have someone to pick upthe pieces and put them back togetherthat was say 1970 to 73 but as UNIXmoved into computer centers and more andmore people depended on it a lot of workwas done to make it a much more reliablesystem and actually today it's used insome very fairly demanding applicationsone of the things that people don'trealize is that actually UNIX touchesthem through the phone system almostevery day if you ever want to get yourtelephone fixed the system that keepstrack of all that work is run by UNIXand it has very reliable database allright there's a when we get intosomething like a micro based systemwhere some of them kick the power cordas they're walking by now there therehave been criticisms that at that pointand that's that's in a commercial systemright it's people like you worried aboutright and indeed there has been a lot ofwork that has had to go on to make it alot more reliable system and it hashappened mark I want to go back to yourdemo for a minute from a user's point ofview you've shown me how you considerfriendly up UNIX here and make it looklike ms-dos but from a user's point ofview then why do I care what am Igetting from this UNIX based applicationthat I couldn't have been getting froman ms-dos based application there thereare two major features that UNIX offersand I would I would emphasize the pointthat everyone doesn't want UNIX okay ifyou have an MS system running anapplication and it's doing what you needit to do maybe UNIX is not what you needhowever UNIX is a multi-user operatingsystem I can I can do a query look atdata at the same time someone else islooking or changing the same datasomeone else and this is all on the samemachine is using word processing systemsomeone is doing graphso it's a multi-usermachine everyone doesn't have to fightover the one machine it's also Multimulti tongue-twister multitaskingoperating system I can be performing mywork here while the printer is printinga report and while I'm doing some otherprocessing in the background so I'll bedoing this every word and also mentionthat that's that those that's not theonly operating system the microworlddoes that of course because iBM hasannounced top view which is amultitasking operating system the courseconcurrent dose is the same sort ofthing and we see again this contentionthat's taking place right in the middleof unix coming down and these otheroperating systems coming up and itreally points out that I think that alot of people are looking for that newfacility have been able to domultitasking and UNIX is a very good wayto do to provide that function can if Ican open up another area which is analternative to a multi-user environmentthat's becoming that's talked aboutincreasingly its local area networks andI think it's important also to contrastthat with a multi-user system and Ithink it's some at some point in thefuture that will be a viable alternativeright now you don't have your hardstandard network you don't have everyoneyou can't plug every computer into thesame network but I think that'ssomething to watch in the future rightnow there one thing when they asked uson this maybe John answer this is itAllah say top you for example hasaddressed the problem of standardizedgraphics interface with VDIfrom IBM what what's evolving in termsof UNIX standards for standardizing thegraphics display so that's that at thispoint is hard to tell the I guess againthe reason there is found in history isthat UNIX certainly was done originallyfor fairly slow speed terminals thatinterface is pretty well standard UNIXhas also gotten fairly standardized inthe handling of regular CRTs rightthere's a normal standard interfacethere's still an amazing session work onthe graphics area and you canparticularly particularly see that thisis a period where some parts of UNIXhave become standard and other parts areunder a lotheavy work certainly UNIX is used onanything from personal computer machinesthrough fairly powerful single userworkstations I'm afraid to have tointerrupt we gotta move on because injust a minute we're going to be two moreUNIX experts and we're going to take alook at the new UNIX PC from youletPackard so stay with us joining us nowis Doug Hartman Doug is the manager ofUNIX development at youlet Packard andnext to Doug Mike Denny a UNIXconsultant and the vice president andco-founder of basis which is a UNIXResource Center in Berkeley one of thekey people in the development of UNIX isa man named Bill joy who sometimescalled the father of four point twowhich is the Berkeley version of UNIXreporter Wendy woods has a profile ofBill joy the success of Bill Joy's UNIX4.2 can best be measured by the successof his own company Sun Microsystemswhich makes a line of UNIX 4.2 basedmini computers and workstations has gonefrom 6 to over 1,000 employees in threeyears Sun ships more than seven milliondollars worth of equipment each month tothe technical and engineeringcommunities which find UNIX 4.2 theideal operating environment for theirspecialized software needs but despitehis success bill joy isn't allowing hisUNIX 4.2 to stagnate he continues towork closely with his university rootsto improve on Unix unlike others UNIXhas hit the point we're starting to getstandardized by standards committees andadopted by and really attempt to get tocontrol the development by majorcorporations like IBM and AT&T and thatthat inevitably involves a slowing downof the rate of change in the system asfor the future of Unix he says it's opensource code versatility and ability towork on a variety of machines means itwill be popular with scientists andengineers for some time Unix will beimportant if it can deliver applicationsthat people want to run the technicalmarket needs more operating systemcapabilities and you're likely to seefrom the smaller systems so you know wedon't really have an alterinto applications delivery vehicle thenUNIX but will UNIX ever make it big inthe business market bill joy doubts ithe says what's needed is a UNIX basedbusiness program like Lotus 1-2-3something big and successful and untilthat's written he says quote I'm notsuper hopeful reporting for the computerchronicles I'm Wendy woods still in thelast segment we focused in on this issueof user friendliness like I saidoverworked word micro users have come toexpect this idea of a graphical animatedcommunication with their programs andone of the points of a unix beingsuccessful is to be able to do that inthe micro world Doug is we got anexample of what hewlett-packard is doneto provide a shell or a bit kind of ananimated communication that's right onour integral PC we have an example ofusing Windows menus that sort of thingto give people a friendlier userinterface we can select say aspreadsheetI mean printing the information in thespreadsheet and while that's going on wecan be selecting other say graphicalwindows look Doug there are othercomputers that don't use UNIX that cando some of the stuff we've seen you knowmultiple windows and other machines andmultitasking what now is special aboutUNIX here the big thing the use hasgoing for it is the compatibility withvarious other machines softwareportability the idea that you can takeprograms which are written on some othermachine bring them to another UNIX pacemachine with very little effort makes asoftware developer's job barriness as wetalked about earlier in terms of the Clanguage in the standard runtime librarythe idea is if an application softwarewriter codes in a machine independentway using say C and the runtime librarythen it can run on UNIX or can run onconcur and dos or under ms-dos andthings of that's where it's a verypowerful concept for software writers wementioned before for point two which isthe Berkeley version of UNIX and I'dlike to clear up what may be someconfusion to people we hear about xenixwe hear about UNIX I think you call yourthing hp-ux we are pci-xsystem 3 system 54.2 and so on why arethere so many versions of UNIX and howdo they differ Mike just luck theproliferation of names besides UNIX isdictated by ATT's requireyou don't call it eunuchs so eachmanufacturer comes up with their littlename for it the most part it is fairlystandardxenyx machine looks like eunuchs to meit may have a few extras here and theremaybe a couple of things your favoriteutility may not be there but to movefrom even between the so-called berkeleycamp and the ATT Bell Labs camp ofeunuchs very very strikingly the same yequal leaf and why does the implement ofthe say the system's programmers feelthis need to make local changes arethere social in nature what I noticedone example that I had came into it toour computer center and I I asked one ofthe local programmers said well I don'tthink the silo statement weren't quiteright and he got on there and mademodifications to the source code andcompiled right into the system rightthere on the spot so we had a differentoperating system right there at thatvery time so because it's so easy tochew make changes to it I thinkeverybody you know adulteries therelet's say improves the recipe that theyreceived from Grandma and this case MAand particular manufacturers for exampleof the receive the official originalsource code and they're puttingimplemented on their machine may haveparticular target markets in mind forexample the emphasis on networkingworkstations is contrasted with anemphasis on multi-user transactionmachines for database manager now whatabout eighty their role in this rightnow are they trying to say bring theseversions back into one standard quiteapparently ATT would like to establishdefine the V standard as system 55.2 andwe'll get other decimal points behind inthe dotted line there is another kind ofde facto standards out of the the socalled berkeley 4.2 standarddistribution they are in fact quitedifferent code underneath to the outsidemost user they look very similar withthe difference of some utilities it'squite common for a manufacturerprobably think of a half-dozen who haveadopted ATT eunuchs but put Berkeleyutilities on top of so-called extensionsseems like that might be the safe placeto put their nifty things from Berkeleyand then there is the basic gimmicksit's oh now there's another questionthat comes up I think in the minds ofmany people is that iBM has a couple ofversions of UNIX that they aresupporting are they're doing this justto say fill the market out or they arethey really trying to get behind theeffort in the sense of you think of IBMAT&T as being competitors and it's alittle strange to think that IBM mightbe promoting a competitor's product welland ATT uses IBM computers you knowcockles of the organization I I think wewould all get rich if we knew the answerto this business with any confidenceDoug I want to ask you about yourimplementation of Unix on something likethis we're talking here about a $5,000PC in the first part of the show we werelooking at a 12 to $15,000 a prettyhigh-end AT&T machine do we loseanything in the implementation here isthis the same UNIX the only thing thatwe've really left out is the hard diskwhich would allow you to do your ownprogram development by leaving out thehard disk we can reduce the cost butstill leave you enough to runapplicationsno I I've read in one of the tradesrecently that there was talk thatCommodore was gonna come out whether itwas Unix at that level necessity for youknow kind of Mac Mac a lookalike runningUNIX is that kind of thing possiblecertainly technology is there to do thatit's really been a question of if theapplications are there support the homeend-user I think if any kind of a rumorlike that were truly would have to get adifferent from the standard machine youbuy on the Kmart imagine trying to getyou to explain to you it's right at thatlevel if we could go to let's go back tothe core a file system at this point thecurrently guess is what it might becalled operating systems from the microworld right now provide multitaskingfile lockout record lockout facilitieslike that what does Unix really offerthat is I think you know substantiallydifferent it will make it a successfulbesides its backing by AT&Twell I like to take that one I thinkthat with UNIX you've got the promise ofbeing able to offer the same kinds ofenvironments and user interfaces acrossa broad range computersboth at work and at home so that youdon't have to relearn everything justbecause you move to a different but ifyou're anything inherent in the filesystem say is special access methodslet's say the IBM term net andterminology and indexed sequentialaccess methods or anything reallysubstantially different about the wayfiles are accessed say from themicroworld that simply not necessarilythough it is a very very flexible sortof least common denominator so that ISam's can be used on top of the UNIXitself doesn't provide okay so then butthey are around most so maybe let's sayAT&T is backing in the number ofapplications and so forth it maydetermine success of UNIX computer 200utilities that do handy things don'thurt yeah and some of its emulation onemight dare say of UNIX buy ms-dos otherproducts that see concepts and try toimplement them UNIX can't claim to bethe sole source of such usefulfunctionality okay gentlemen well thereare clearly two points of view onwhether UNIX will prevail is a new kindof standard operating system andcommentator Paul Schindler has somethoughts on that sure I should be usinga can opener instead of a screwdriver toopen this can of tomato juice I mean acan opener is the appropriate tool forthe job well I'm one of those peoplethat feel Unix is the wrong tool in thewrong place in the microcomputer worldyeah I know I've heard all the argumentsUNIX is so easy to move to new computersUNIX programs are so easy to move fromcomputer to computer well I'm sorry butI think that's just so much Buncombelook let's face a few facts UNIX wasdeveloped by a bunch of brilliantprogrammers at Bell Laboratories theywanted a great mini computer environmentto develop software him and that's whatthey created and that's what UNIX istoday a great place to do mini computersoftwarewhat UNIX is not is what AT&T and a lotof other companies are trying to make itinto the ultimate micro computeroperating system I don't know enough tosay whether it's easy to move UNIX frommachine to machine but I do know thatapplications written for UNIX on onemachine don't always work on anotherthere are incompatible UNIX dialectsgalore UNIX is a user hostile operatingsystem dramatically short on softwarethat's my opinionI'm Paul Schindler in the random-accessfile this week the Consumer ElectronicsShow is over and there were noblockbuster new products commodore didshow off its new 128 series and promisedto ship it later this month commodorealso displayed its new UNIX machine andtwo new IBM compatibles probably thebiggest hot new area was robots with newpersonal robots being shown by severalmanufacturers Tony introduced a newrobot which can be run by your personalcomputer and Nintendo showed off a gameplaying robot that interfaces with thegame on your computer screen there wererobots with synthesized speech androbots that change their facialexpressions Atari was a last-minuteexhibitor and Confused the st pictureeven more by showing a new 256 K modelwhich will supposedly sell for $4.99Atari also unveiled its new cd-romstorage system the disc holds 500megabytes and will sell for about $500Atari said it will ship this Decemberwhat makes you choose one computer overanotherwell performance being equal the mostimportant factor is the design of thekeyboard according to a study justcompleted by a Connecticut design firmbuyers may want bells and whistles butthey also want a simple looking keyboardcontrasting colors on function keys fulltravel Keys long space bars and a quotesubstantial look generally meaning thickedges light waves are not only replacingelectrons in computer storage butresearchers at the Center for appliedoptics at the University of Alabama saylight beams may soon replace electronsin the computer itself the center'sdirector says optical computers usingphotons and lasers will be smaller useless power and allow forthree-dimensional design and moreefficient parallel processing theoptical research is being funded by thePentagon which sees optical processingpower as essential to an effective StarWars system our star of the softwareWars as Paul Schindler and here's hisreview for the week they say you cantell how good a word person is bywhether they work the New York Timescrossword puzzle in ink or in pencilwell I got to tell you I don't work itat all but if you do you want to tryword maker a truly obscure softwarepackage from word ofit's at 55 Sutter Street in SanFrancisco now normally we don't giveaddresses but these guys aren't in thephonebook and you can't buy word makerin any store this is the softwarepackage for word lovers it makes thegrandiose claim of including every wordin the English language its searchtechnique is a real boon for thecrossword puzzle fan if you know howlong the word is and can fill in some ofthe letters you can search through ahundred thousand words and find allthose that match what you have now Ican't review this package withoutpointing out that it's command menu isone of the simplest most useful I'veever seen this package used to costfifty dollars but at that price no onewanted it so word Associates cut theprice to $10.00 just over the price of afloppy word maker from word associates55 Sutter Street San Francisco for thecomputer chronicles I'm Paul Schindlerlooking for a word processor and want toknow what everyone else is buying wellhere's the latest list of top sellersleading the pack is IBM's writingassistant followed by Microsoft's wordbank street writer from brøderbund andthen PFS write and multi mate word starcomes in six the Bank of America andChemical Bank are forming a jointventure with AT&T and time incorporatedto expand home banking services intobroader based electronics services forhome users chemicals pronto and B of A'shome banking now have nearly 40,000subscribers the Defense Department hasjust completed a study which says thatof the 17,000 DoD computers only 30 ofthem are adequately protected fromunauthorized entry the head of computersecurity for the Pentagon said they arecurrently vulnerable to any mentallyunbalanced 16 year old industrial robotsales are moving right along in the USsales of robots were up 71 percent inthe past year there are now nearly15,000 robots at work in the UnitedStates up from less than 10,000 just ayear ago finally the tough times in thecomputer business were evident at lastweek's CES show in Chicago lots of boothspace reserved for computer companieswent unused but the space was quicklygrabbed up by the makers of x-ratedvideo cassettes apparently that part ofthe home entertainment business is doingjust fine that's it for this week'scomputer Chronicles we'll see you nexttime the computer Chronicles is broughtto you in part by mcgraw-hill publishersof popularcomputing magazine featuring microcomputer applications and increasedproductivity for managers andprofessionals