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. The Computer Science Department, together with the Mathematics Department and the Statistics Department were able to jointly purchase a PDP-11/45. In January, 1974, a Version 4 tape was delivered and UNIX was installed by graduate student Keith Standiford.

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. In order for that to happen, however, current third-generation computer languages (such as C and fortran) will have to move aside for a new family of fourth-generation languages.

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 November 1985 issue of MicroTimes magazine

Jef Raskin believes that computers should be easy to use. How easy? Well, he calls his company Information Appliance, and favors computers as hassle-free as toasters.

By contrast, Raskin says, the current state of the industry more closely resembles a scenario conjured up by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fame). “Adams was describing some imaginary product of the future, and he said that people get such a sense of achievement from having mastered it that they forget how useless it is. I think that’s really a key problem in the industry today — a person works on the computer and they get all this mastery, and they just forget all the little gut-wrenching annoyances they went through when they used it first.”

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. sa Ae

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. But in any published, professional work, he prefers to use the initials of his real name, Phillip James.

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. In computing (as indeed in most walks of life) everything is a trade-off. A RISC processor trades off the number of instructions available to the programmer for speed; RISC processors can execute many times faster than their more complex brethren. When implemented as microprocessors in silicon, RISC designs also save precious space on the chip; smaller chips can be designed and debugged more quickly and cost less to fabricate.

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.