I have a strange nostalgia for the old Unix days that I was too young— perhaps not even alive yet— to experience the first time around. It's what draws me to learning and using things like vim, Perl, awk, sed, etc. Those tools feel arcane and mystical.
I've been there too. Installing, trying, running older and older Unixes in SIMH. 4.1BSD, 32V, V7, V6, all the way down to V0 on the PDP-7 with the help of tutorials on gunkies.org.
I still keep a neatly organized folder of primitive Unix systems with their (tiny) disk images and SIMH boot scripts.
But going all the way back to the Big Bang at V0, a funny thing happened.
The essence was still missing. Because indeed the open-source foundations weren't really born from Unix and the PDP-11. I only had focused on the technicalities.
No. The missing half of the puzzle is ITS and the PDP-10.
This is where the hacker movement, GNU and the free software philosophy were born. The world of Stallman versus the world of Thomson. The root of emacs, LISP, TeX, and many more. Which interestingly, are both older and more timeless than the Unix part of the puzzle.
After the demise of the PDP-10 in the 80s, Unix (and ultimately Linux) just happened to be a convenient hardware abstraction layer to carry the torch, to run what really mattered. Unix had been the tool but not the essence.
This is where I reached the end of my journey: ITS, emacs, and the birthplace of the hacker and free software spirit. I was enlightened, and the words "GNU's Not Unix" finally made sense!
I have a strange nostalgia for the old Unix days that I was too young— perhaps not even alive yet— to experience the first time around. It's what draws me to learning and using things like vim, Perl, awk, sed, etc. Those tools feel arcane and mystical.