by Marshall Kirk McKusick from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie presented the first UNIX paper at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Purdue University in November, 1973. Professor Bob Fabry was in attendance and immediately became interested in obtaining a copy of the system to experiment with at Berkeley. At the time, Berkeley had only large mainframe computer systems doing batch processing, so the first order of business was to get a PDP-11/45 suitable for running the then current Version 4 of UNIX.

from the July 1985 issue of Unix World magazine by David Spencer Current third-generation languages such as C and FORTRAN will have to move aside at some point for a new family of fourth-generation languages. At 30 years old, FORTRAN is graying at the temples; third-generation programming languages are in their heyday. So you are probably wondering how we will speak to computers during the next decade. If current projections hold true, computers will seem (and talk) more like us fairly soon.

Notes from the underground by Doug Merritt with Ken Arnold and Bob Toxen from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine It was 2 am and I was lying face down on the floor in Cory Hall, the EECS building on the UC Berkeley campus, waiting for Bob to finish installing our bootleg copy of the UNIX kernel. If successful, new and improved terminal drivers we had written would soon be up and running.

from the July 15, 1985 issue of ComputerWorld magazine by Mitch Betts The Internal Revenue Service is taking steps to ensure that this year’s computer fiascoes, which delayed the processing of tax returns for several weeks, will not happen again next year. According to IRS Commissioner Roscoe L. Egger, the IRS plans to acquire additional computer capacity at IRS service centers, provide additional training for programmers and conduct a complete review of computer operations.

from the April 15, 1985 issue of ComputerWorld magazine by Bryan Wilkins It has taken four years to implement, but an AT&T Unix-based distributed processing system is now being used by a branch of the Internal Revenue Service in its 10 offices. The project began in 1981 — before distributed processing in a multiuser environment was a popular concept — when IRS planners opted to implement such a system in 10 IRS branch offices.

from the June 1985 issue of Computer Language magazine By Craig LaGrow He calls himself a programmer at heart. But as an accomplished science fiction writer, president of a successful software company, technical book author, musician, and runner, P.J. Plauger is certainly a man of many talents. His friends and work associates know him as Bill — a name he was affectionately given by his older sister three days after his birth.

from the December 1985 issue of Australian Personal Computer The Reduced Instruction Set Processor (RISC) era has begun, albeit quietly, and working examples are now appearing on the market. Dick Pountain examines three such processors. What exactly is a RISC, and why is it a good thing? A reduced instruction set processor, as the name suggests, is one which can execute only a small number of different instructions, compared to the prevailing standards of the day.

from the July 15, 1985 issue of ComputerWorld magazine by Edward Warner Although the IBM Personal Computer AT was greeted by the cheers of corporate users craving speed for their spreadsheets, the machine holds other potential, particularly the ability to run programs in up to 16M bytes of random-access memory (RAM). That potential remains largely untapped, and the situation may not change anytime soon because many important software firms have held off on developing packages specifically for the AT.

by Otis Wilson from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine Thanks to the developers of the UNIX operating system, and to the research method at AT&T Bell Laboratories, the technical evolution of the UNIX System has been well documented and its history largely understood. From a technical perspective, there just isn’t much argument about who did what when and why things were done the way they were. On the other hand, the “business” history of the UNIX system is largely an oral one, rich in folklore and popularized by the modem press in hopes of finding some explanation for the phenomenon that is the UNIX system.

by Bill Tuthill from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine C is descended from B, which was descended from BCPL. BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) was developed in 1967 by Martin Richards. B was an interpretive language written in 1970 by Ken Thompson (1) after he abandoned a Fortran implementation for the PDP-7. BCPL and B were typeless languages, which may account for the type permissiveness of C. They restricted their scope to machine words and were rather low level.