Forgetting The History Of Unix Is Coding Us Into A Corner
The Register, Friday, February 16th, 2024
The lessons of yesteryear's OS are getting lost in translation
There are vital lessons to be learned from the history of Unix, but they're being forgotten. This is leading to truly vast amounts of wasted effort.
This article is the second in a series of pieces based on The Reg FOSS desk's talk at FOSDEM 2024.
FOSDEM is a conference all about free and open source software, and these days, perhaps regrettably, FOSS is about Unix. Increasingly, Unix today is Linux. The problem is that everyone is forgetting what UNIX really is and knowing your history is essential. As George Santayana said, often misquoted:
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
It's often misquoted, which may be why Henry Spencer (who did the original FOSS implementation of regex) paraphrased it as: "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."