Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...
I booted UNIX V4 (first C rewrite) in a PDP‑11 emulator. It feels tactile—no backspace, staggered print, slower typing, and it forced me to slow down. Classic Unix tools (ls, cat, ed, cal, dc) and ...
Making a CPU or indeed a whole computer system from scratch using discrete logic chips is by no means an unusual project, but it’s still one that requires quite a lot of technical ability and ...
A fascinating little point made in a much longer piece about the smartphone wars. One that makes me wonder whether Unix can now be considered to be the most successful operating system of all time.
Early Sunday morning in Greenwich, England, the clock that keeps Universal Time will strike 01:46:40 -- the 40th second of the 46th minute in the second hour of Sept. 9, 2001. That instant will be an ...
Most breaches don’t start with malware or zero-day exploits. They start with a login.  An attacker gets hold of a password, maybe through phishing, reuse, or a leaked credential dump. They test it ...
In the intricate landscape of operating systems, two prominent players have shaped the digital realm for decades: UNIX and Linux. While these two systems might seem similar at first glance, a deeper ...
COMMENTARY--Whoever said the first casualty of war is truth would be surprised to find that apothegm quoted in a dispute between systems vendors. But it is an apt description of current events. The ...
The Rust implementation sudo-rs now shows asterisks by default when typing passwords. A break with long Unix tradition.