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Almost everyone has heard of Linux – it is the core of the operating system that hosts a significant proportion of servers on the Internet, including most Google, Facebook, Amazon and many other contemporary online heavyweights.
In its Android version, Linux is the engine of the majority of smartphones, and in one form or another, it is also the core of choice for many IoT devices such as bike computers, home Wi-Fi routers, webcams , baby monitors and even doors.
Most people who use Linux know that the name is kind of a pun on Unix, the operating system to which Linux looks the most.
And Unix, of course, is the operating system behind a large part of the devices that do not run under Linux, at the heart of Apple's macOS and iOS systems, as well as many widely used open source BSD distributions. .
But far from being so many people realize that the name Unix was originally Unics, and was himself a pun on Multics, the revolutionary multi-user operating system behind the Unix project itself.
Multics, meanwhile, was essentially version 2 of an operating system called MIT (Massachussets Institute of Technology) CTSS, short for Compatible time sharing system.
We take for granted these days
CTSS offered a whole new way of organizing calculations, a method we take for granted on our laptops, servers and phones.
You can run programs in the background as batch jobs or in the foreground as interactive sessions. It was "you (plural)," because multiple users could run interactive sessions at the same time.
Each user had the illusion of having his own computer, with programs and users protected from mutual trampling by a supervisory program controlling the material and distributing its resources among the different processes taking place side by side.
As with many new generation projects, Multics was ambitious: it used a new hardware specifically designed for this purpose and a large development team divided into several organizations.
Indeed, it is the complexity of the Multics project that led to Unix, a simplified alternative approach described by Unix co-creator Dennis Ritchie: one of what Multics was a lot of.
In the end, it 's the Unix approach, lighter, cleaner, smaller and smaller, which won the day. That's why today we use the term "Unix-like systems" as it's synonymous with "everything that is not Windows." "(And even Windows is now shipped with a Unix-like subsystem).
However, we could just as well, and with a deeper sense of history, say Of inspiration multics or Derived from CTSS instead of.
As Dennis Ritchie said in the 1970s:
In most cases, UNIX is a very conservative system. Only a few ideas are really new. In fact, it is reasonable to say that this is essentially a modern implementation of MIT's CTSS system. This claim is intended to complement UNIX and CTSS. Today, more than fifteen years after the birth of CTSS, few known interactive systems are superior to it in terms of ease of use; many are of inferior design.
The man behind everything
The man behind CTSS and Multics, the man who laid the foundation that allowed Unix to happen, was Fernando José Corbató, better known simply as Corby.
Corby won the Alan Turing Award in 1990 – the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Computer Science:
For his pioneering work in organizing concepts and leading the development of large-scale, time-sharing and resource systems, CTSS and Multics.
And that brings us to this sad news that Corby passed away yesterday at the age of 93.
Do not forget it
It is amusing to think that Corby "invented" the password of the computer. Wired magazine, in 2012, reported:
According to Corbató, even though MIT hackers were innovating with much of what they did, passwords were pretty much a no-brainer. "The key problem was that we were configuring multiple devices that needed to be used by multiple people, but each person had their own set of private files. […] Setting a password for each individual user as a lock seemed to be a very simple solution. "
Thus, even in the 1960s, when computer security was almost an oxymoron, Corby wanted the notion of privacy protection to be backed up by technological controls that prevented people from escaping their mutual occupations …
… a legacy that should be kept in mind as we approach the 2020s and in a world where we now have almost all the technological controls we need to preserve the confidentiality of our personal information.
Ironically, however, we now seem to continue to call for contrary controls that are very likely to leave others out of our business only in thought and not in fact.
Fernando José Corbató, RIP.
Featured Image of Corby with a Computer Through the MIT Computer and Artificial Intelligence Lab
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