Does the Mac-Windows-Linux Race Ever Change?
I’ve been on a history kick lately, inspired by the fact that the foundation of the Unix operating system was created just 40 years ago this summer, starting with software written by Ken Thompson at Bell Laboratories. He wrote an OS, a shell, an editor, and an assembler all in just one month, in assembly language, to run a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer.
The outcome of that work changed the future course of digital history. From that original foundation ,which he called Unics, enlarged and modified time and again, sprang Minix, Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, and Solaris, together with corresponding server OS’s and a raft of short-lived but briefly popular variants.
Scanning through some of the Unix entries on Wikipedia, I came across a fascinating essay written ten years ago by Neal Stephenson, the real award-winning science fiction author behind the pen name Stephen Bury. It’s titled “In the Beginning was the Command Line,” but in addition to its core message it is a concise sociological assessment of the state of the Microsoft-Apple-Linux balance in that epoch.
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