30 Years Since 1969

by Peter H. Salus
<peter@pedant.com>

USENIX Historian


No, I wasn't careless. I really want to discuss 30 years ago, not 30 years ago in UNIX. Because I see this summer and autumn as the fruit of a number of things that went on in 1969.

In July 1969, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the culmination of John F. Kennedy's 1961 vision of putting a man on our satellite within the decade.

In summer 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created what we now think of as UNIX.

And on September 2, 1969, IMP #1 (Interface Message Processor #1) was plugged in in Len Kleinrock's lab at UCLA.

It's pointless to try to enumerate the scientific developments that have grown out of NASA's programs, for things like the robot arm have proven to have influenced medicine, and the materials research has ended up in everyone's kitchen.

But think of what the folks at Bell Labs effected where the development of computing is concerned. And imagine what other scientific and engineering achievements wouldn't exist without the impetus of this operating system.

Finally, here we are, in what Alan Greenspan has referred to as an "information society." But without the UNIX operating system and the ARPANET/Internet matrix, we would be shipping wads of paper around and we wouldn't be able to process what we receive.

Thirty years ago I was an associate professor at the University of Toronto, where a gracious administration had "given" me a PDP-8 for research purposes. A 12-bit machine designed and created by Bell and de Castro. 4K of memory. Paper tape. It was only in 1975 that I got a DECwriterII and a 110-baud acoustic modem that connected my office to the IBM 360. I'm typing this onto an Ultra 5 in Boston and will soon send it off via my ISDN connection to the USENIX office.

The work world has changed.

Our homes have changed.

Bardeen and Brattain invented the transistor on December 16, 1947. It took nearly seven years to work its way into technology: In October 1954, you could buy a Regency TR1 radio with four transistors manufactured by Texas Instruments. Thomas Watson, Jr., bought over 100, telling his executives that "if that little outfit down in Texas can make these radios work for that kind of money, they can make transistors that will make our computers work, too."

Four years later, IBM produced its first transistorized computer, the 7090. It was five times faster than the tube-powered 709.

All of this is merely to point out how much has changed and how rapidly.

There are many anniversaries this year, but in one of the most remarkable coincidences, Neil Armstrong, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Len Kleinrock, Doug Engelbart, and their many associates wove the strands of time in that summer 30 years ago that yielded us today's fabric.