Everybody trying to make sense of an internet site needs UNIX Filesystems
After almost 4 decades of working on computers, I have to come to grips with UNIX and thankfully my cousin Steve D. Pate has written the book UNIX Filesystems. (In Canada UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation)
How did he know I needed help?
This year we had to bite to bullet since our hosting company, like everyone, runs on UNIX. We could use Windows if we hated ourselves but it is not practical.
If you’re like me trying to keep your head above water running a blog or website there is a step most of us missed.
My misspent youth without UNIX
I was raised on mainframes and Microsoft and missed the UNIX step. My early computer days were on IBM 360 and 370s. Due to a “back to the land” urge in the 70s, the mini-computer craze that swept the world missed Murray Harbour North.
Oh sure I learned a little RPG but who didn’t if they were near IBM. But the whole Heinz 56 flavors of UNIX thing went by in a Whoosh.
There was Greg Guptil up in Summerside doing UNIX while muttering about that “dammed Island Computer” to anyone who would listen. And Jim Hancock the Internet pioneer at UPEI was a UNIX fan.
Down in Montague in a back room behind the hair stylist in the Down East Plaza, we were cooking up wonders with Etherlink. Byte Magazine had an article that claimed an IBM PC could run a network like UNIX so we ordered two Etherlink cards from 3COM.
Collin Affleck ran a wire from one IBM PC to another, popped in the cards and after negotiating the trickier parts of a handshake, we were connected. He could ping me and I could ping him. We had ourselves a network.
They forgot to tell us you needed software beyond the drivers to do something. We ordered up all the software they had that said “Ether” including a game about the Ether Bunny. Before long we had a network in Montague.
We moved right on to Novell Netware. It was the real network for PCs in the mid 80s. Before long, I was the “hexpert” on selling Novell and Collin was the “hexpert” on making Novell Networks run.
That’s why we missed UNIX. Missed the whole craze for an operating system that was so open everyone wrote extensions that wouldn’t UNIX port to another company’s computers.
UNIX under the covers of NT
David Cutler OS wizard working on Windows Azzure, a new cloud operating system for 2010
UNIX came back to bite us with the Internet since the Internet is based on UNIX. Microsoft NT is really UNIX under the covers and so is Windows 7.
When Microsoft wanted to be more like IBM and Apple, they hired Dave Cutler from Digital Equipment or DEC. Dave was the designer of operating systems for DEC like RSX-11M, VMS and VAXELN which are all household names today.
“He was also known for his disdain for all things UNIX. His sardonic nature shown through in the VMS v UNIX debates at DEC in the early 1980s. He would often show his low opinion by referring to the UNIX process I/O model by reciting “getta byte, getta byte, getta byte byte byte” to the rhythm of the “cavalry charge” finale of Rossini’s William Tell Overture (made popular as the theme music for the Lone Ranger TV series).” Wikipedia
Ken Olson, the founder and CEO of DEC, told Cutler no one would want a graphical operating system on a desktop that networked. When Bill Gates heard about that, he hired Cutler I believe around 1989 and by 1993 Microsoft had released the first version of Windows NT. The NT launch in Toronto was my first time to meet Steve Ballmer who was a vice-president back then.
It took Microsoft years but they did migrate off the MS-DOS operating system to Windows NT and UNIX-under-the-covers in Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Server, Vista and Windows 7.
UNIX File systems
I haven’t read the book but it gets a 4 star rating on Amazon and my cousin wrote it.
Amazon describes the book as “The first of its kind to cover all versions of UNIX and Linux file-systems. Uses both VERITAS and OpenVision systems examples and most importantly, providing a working Linux files ystem with which the reader can experiment.”
Product Description
- Covers all versions of UNIX, as well as Linux, operating systems that are used by the majority of Fortune 1000 companies for their mission-critical data
- Offers more detail than other books on the file input/output aspects of UNIX programming
- Describes implementation of UNIX filesystems over a thirty year period
- Demonstrates VERITAS and other filesystem examples
They left out the part about my cousin writing it but you would have figured that out. We even have the same middle name “D.”
In the US, the link is UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation
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