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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers The history of UNIX and the ideas behind it Post 29957 by elendil on Monday 14th of October 2002 08:14:40 PM
Old 10-14-2002
CPU & Memory The history of UNIX and the ideas behind it

Hi. I am new here, and this is my first post at the UNIX.com forums. I have read the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, and I noticed that neither UNIX nor Linux was mentioned once in the book. Why is this? What was UNIX's place in the early days of personal computers?

I realize that mainframes probably had proprietary operating systems specific to the manufacturer, or even the model of the computer. And it is also true that personal computers either had homebrewed operating systems or basic operating systems like Q-DOS or CP/M.

But what about UNIX? Where does that fit in? I've given it some thought, and it seems sensible that minicomputers (note that I refer to minicomputers as computers such as the PDP-8) might have used UNIX. It sounds like that would fit. Mainframe computers have their own proprietary operating system, minicomputers have a good operating system, such as UNIX, and UNIX probably won't fit on personal computers, so developers made homebrewed operating systems. Am I right?

Also, I have another question about the structure and basic ideas of UNIX. A small portion of the book Just for Fun, of which my copy is signed by Linus Torvalds, states that UNIX was a small-is-beautiful operating system. So I thought about how that would work. I would have the operating system take care of tasks such as the filesystem and the management of processes. But if thats roughly what UNIX does, what is Unix then? Is it just a central control station of the computer that manages processes, and manages the file system?

I also gave some thought about the notion of processes. Say I was making an operating system. I would either make a process for or integrate into the shell something like saving files and opening them. This process would take care of all of the stuff having to do with files. Maybe the file system itself would be embedded into the operating system, but this would not. Since it would be a modern operating system, it would seem sensible and convenient to not only add support for the hard drive, but for the floppy disk and the CD-ROM drive and CD-RW. I would want to have the desired effect of something like this:

> write E: doc1.txt, doc2.txt, doc3.tga, doc5.pdf

Even if this was a CD-RW, it would write the files to the E: drive. Would this be what a file i/o process would do, or would it have a special process for the floppy disk, the hard drive, and the CD-RW?

One last thing: in the shell sample I wrote above, write would be a command of the shell, and the word write would signal to start the process FILEio.exe with the parameters of E:, doc1.txt..., right?

I am sorry if I have bored you with my endless post. Thanks!
 

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history(n)						       Tcl Built-In Commands							history(n)

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

NAME
history - Manipulate the history list SYNOPSIS
history ?option? ?arg arg ...? _________________________________________________________________ DESCRIPTION
The history command performs one of several operations related to recently-executed commands recorded in a history list. Each of these recorded commands is referred to as an ``event''. When specifying an event to the history command, the following forms may be used: [1] A number: if positive, it refers to the event with that number (all events are numbered starting at 1). If the number is negative, it selects an event relative to the current event (-1 refers to the previous event, -2 to the one before that, and so on). Event 0 refers to the current event. [2] A string: selects the most recent event that matches the string. An event is considered to match the string either if the string is the same as the first characters of the event, or if the string matches the event in the sense of the string match command. The history command can take any of the following forms: history Same as history info, described below. history add command ?exec? Adds the command argument to the history list as a new event. If exec is specified (or abbreviated) then the command is also exe- cuted and its result is returned. If exec isn't specified then an empty string is returned as result. history change newValue ?event? Replaces the value recorded for an event with newValue. Event specifies the event to replace, and defaults to the current event (not event -1). This command is intended for use in commands that implement new forms of history substitution and wish to replace the current event (which invokes the substitution) with the command created through substitution. The return value is an empty string. history clear Erase the history list. The current keep limit is retained. The history event numbers are reset. history event ?event? Returns the value of the event given by event. Event defaults to -1. history info ?count? Returns a formatted string (intended for humans to read) giving the event number and contents for each of the events in the history list except the current event. If count is specified then only the most recent count events are returned. history keep ?count? This command may be used to change the size of the history list to count events. Initially, 20 events are retained in the history list. If count is not specified, the current keep limit is returned. history nextid Returns the number of the next event to be recorded in the history list. It is useful for things like printing the event number in command-line prompts. history redo ?event? Re-executes the command indicated by event and return its result. Event defaults to -1. This command results in history revision: see below for details. HISTORY REVISION
Pre-8.0 Tcl had a complex history revision mechanism. The current mechanism is more limited, and the old history operations substitute and words have been removed. (As a consolation, the clear operation was added.) The history option redo results in much simpler ``history revision''. When this option is invoked then the most recent event is modified to eliminate the history command and replace it with the result of the history command. If you want to redo an event without modifying history, then use the event operation to retrieve some event, and the add operation to add it to history and execute it. KEYWORDS
event, history, record Tcl history(n)
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