we're talking late 70s over to early 80s
a crucial period actually for computers
in many regards yes there was definitely
a british's best britain first
purchasing policy
either for government institutions like
radar establishments like the police all
this kind of stuff and particularly for
educational uh establishments the
feeling was computers are expensive
so
if we can spend a lot of money it might
as well
be fed back into the british economy by
buying british certainly applied to
universities
one or two were allowed to escape i
think university of newcastle on the
computer science front was allowed to
have an ibm so of course was the
university of cambridge i can't remember
what happened at oxford
it was a way for me to find out by the
back door about the advantages in a way
of sharing a hardware platform with not
just other universities but other
government institutions and in one of
the previous videos i've talked about
how we only felt able to use algol 68 as
a teaching language because that
well-known government institution
blessed them the royal radar
establishment had actually put a huge
amount of effort into setting up a very
good algol 68 compiler and of course it
had to be on ico machinery they were a
government establishment so were we so
we benefited from that a lot how did you
get into unix you went to the states
didn't you can you tell me about it yes
i it's true
i went over to the states in
1978 for the whole calendar year
and visited in short order and it was
all highly educational a visit to
oklahoma state university where they'd
written an alcohol 68 compiler so
given my interest in those days that was
a no-brainer but i then thought no no if
i'm going to be away for a year i want
the california experience
and so i finagled my way into doing some
teaching at ucla of course in los
angeles but also in the cal state system
cal state northridge is a well-known
california state thing and i did i
lectured all sorts of computer things
there taught fortran in oklahoma and so
on it was weird actually
but in some ways at nottingham we were a
little bit ahead of the curve there
because before i left we've taken our
first tentative steps into getting this
thing called unix
which enabled you on a
underpowered pdp-11 to sort of run your
own
programming experience multi-user but
only on dumb terminals yeah
multi-user multitasking operating system
hopelessly under bad machinery but it
sort of worked and this was must have
been about 76 when we bought
um
first of all the pdp 1105 just to get
used to having our own computer of some
sort could do a similar programming but
i think just more or less as i
got in the plane for america
colleagues told me that no we're going
to
get that upgraded to a pdp 1135 as
quickly as possible and that when we do
we will be ready to receive this
operating system called unix done by
bell labs and people said to me today if
you'll find just like
why did
a radar establishment have to support
your compiler you'll now be saying why
does a telephone company have to be the
people that provides me with a little
operating system that i feel happy with
and uh it was
it was as yogi bera once said like deja
vu all over again oklahoma state they
were saying wow you know
you're ahead of us we want to go to
eunuchs we can't get approval all this
kind of stuff
so when i came back uh
1979
very cold winter all that it really was
a liberation to know that while we might
have to rely on the competing center for
a lot of bulk teaching and running
programs nevertheless we could start to
do our own thing on pdp-11s with an eye
to the future but even so we couldn't on
a peter 11 35 give a bulk service to our
compsci undergrads we continued running
algol 68
on
icl machinery with a huge extended
overlap with us getting eunuchs because
we couldn't become self-hosting on units
or have enough big powerful machines
until well
after this era we were made very aware
that we were getting this for a few
hundred dollars because it came from
bell labs bell labs was a so-called
regulated monopoly
and that meant
they were caught in the crossfire from
everywhere
they must not be seen to be using their
massive leverage and obscene telephone
bills
to squash little startup telcos they
must not get in the way of ibm
because there was a suspicion that you
know
when people said to bell i was well what
are you doing for the public good they
thought it was a nice cool idea to say
look we've got
basically a computer science research
department we're not a computer company
but these researchers it really was a
bit like marvin's radar defense
establishment we are not a computing
company absolutely not but we have
developed some software that
universities might find interesting so
we're proposing for the public good to
virtually give away this software if
anybody's interested
and it it's a start and ibm won't see it
as a threat
uh so we're all right you can get hold
of this so long as you are a bona fide
degree giving institution you can get
hold of this unix you must have
a course uh p2p11 got to keep america's
balance of payments in the black and it
must be at least a pdp 1135 not the most
minimal you could get if you do that
this unix will get you started in the
great world of multi-user on simple
terminals you can do your own thing
you'll run out of steam after about four
or five users but nevertheless it's all
yours so we cheerfully signed up for
this and this as i say it was back in
1979 it's all about to happen version
seven of unix
i think we did somehow get hold of the
previous one version six
but serious usage started with version
seven
to find out more about this version
seven that we were getting how did you
find out
let me be boring and oldie and say yet
again there was no internet there were
no web pages to tell you about this
there was not even email
you had to send out posters
to departments you had to use letters
you could send faxes
right and you had to say
we are the uk unix user group
principally populated by representatives
from computer science departments in uk
universities
we all almost all of us absolutely
long to have eunuchs
we have persuaded
the american master unix user group
and att the ultimate owners of bell labs
who ran all the patents and licensing
they're going to come over and tell us
how to get licensed for an academic use
only
license for unix and what's it all about
and it was a superb chat shop and ideas
swap shop as it were
enjoyed it hugely the star of the show
was a visitor from at patents and
licensing
frank j riffle jr i remember his name
and uh oh boy did he have the job from
hell trying to keep everybody happy and
he said i want to license you all you're
wonderful you know uh we love
universities and i'm in charge of
patients and licensing but i gotta warn
you you must not do any commercial usage
with this it is purely for degree giving
teaching only right and he kept on
nuttering to himself there were a lot of
gray areas and it's my job to stamp them
out and what a heck of a job it was he
said just remember you must be a bona
fide degree giving university
institution then you will be licensed no
others
a hand goes up from the audience a guy i
got to know quite well later on but he
really was the odd man now han goes up
and said
well how about me you've licensed me for
version six but i'm not at the
university where are you from sir and he
said
marcus gray this guy's name was he said
i'm just a college i'm pre-university
you know from
basically we concentrate from 11 to 18.
i'm marlborough college i'm a public
school now i think even the americans
know that there's nothing more
badly named than an english public
school it is not available to the
poor and the needy as it probably should
be or was originally no some public
schools are so expensive you need
serious money to attend them principally
eaton is the most famous but marlborough
college isn't far behind i mean
the tuition fees at marlborough college
will make your eyes water so this guy
said no no i'm not i'm pre-university
i'm marlboro college but sir over here
you know most colleges are like
universities and marcus said no it's not
the case with me and riffle was getting
more and more ruffled that's a joke
and said
sir let me try and summarize are you
trying to tell me that you are more or
less a very expensive version of what i
would call a high school
and marcus said sort of said yeah that's
roughly right he just looked at mark and
said sir
you should not have been licensed
and he didn't say it but in parenthesis
i could hear it going on in the
background oh boy somebody's going to be
in deep trouble when i get back to
murray hill new jersey he said sir you
should not have been licensed but frank
j riffle is a man of his word i will not
take your license away sir
truly it did change everything and i
do remember very well we had a lot of
conversations at the uk units group
saying
those guys at bell labs are just so good
the two of them obviously dennis and ken
we've talked about them many a time
they've invented the c language for
system implementation they've developed
unix and it does things sensibly and
this is absolutely great aren't we lucky
i thought as a community
to have them
being on our side and i did think i
wonder if they'll ever get any
recognition from the acm which shall we
say about what they've done and i was
very pleased it took till 1983 i think
but eventually so many academics in the
u.s and all over the world were using
unix that dennis and ken were given the
acm touring award it was
actually awarded to them in 84 it was
won and achieved in 83. so in 1984
they had to give a talk
about
what their work meant
and normally when you write a paper to
go with your presentation you thank
everybody which he did but then you go
on to say here's how units came about
here's the nuts and bolts of what it's
like to really run it we didn't get that
at all we got thank yous from ken
in cryptic terms but very heartfelt to a
lot of people so he said i now just want
to point out something to you
effectively
you've got something here
where we use c as a system programming
language so the operating system is
written in a high-level language have
you any idea
the problems that is going to open up to
the potential flaws security holes let
me just demonstrate one of these to you
you'll be amazed and amused and i mean
you know what standards we have on
computer file we don't swear so i'll
allow myself to say that one of the
rather celebrated
people that we're going to point you at
in the next video
just described ken's contribution as a
total effing bombshell and he wasn't
wrong a lot of people couldn't
understand why it was a bombshell but it
really really is and i'd like to do my
best to explain to you
just how what a fundamental earthquake
this caused once people understood what
he was trying to say
a few seconds or half a second of time
then gave him a half and then give her a
little bit and just go round and round
the people who wanted
to do some kind of computing and because
computers were even the signal is moving
in so the speed of those pulses tell us
the rate we know which direction it is
because we know which roller it's coming
from and we can look at those