Unix 50th Anniversary

Ed Grochowski

I posted my experiences to the Slackware forum on Linuxquestions.org in a thread that marked 2019 as the 50th anniversary of Unix.

My first exposure to Unix was with Version 7 Unix in 1982. 40 undergraduate students trying to compile and run their programs on a DEC PDP-11/70 made for a miserable user experience.

However, Unix was very powerful and had sound design principles. It could be extended to perform all modern computing tasks. Advances in hardware and software technology turned the user experience into a pleasant one. Today, I can throw dozens of compile and run jobs at my high-end desktop PC and it won't even bog down.

I commend Slackware for adhering to the Unix design principles. In many ways, Slackware is the heir to the Unix legacy. Slackware users may not realize this, but you are running modern Unix.