Oldies, Hacking, and UNIX
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‘Oregon Trail’ at 50: The story of a game that inspired generations
A long, long time ago in Minneapolis, this question loomed over a small group of eighth-graders.
Appearing on a teletype machine—basically a primitive computer keyboard connected to a printer—at Jordan Junior High School, the strange question broke open the world of The Oregon Trail. Decades later, the title remains perhaps the most influential educational video game ever created, one that endures today as its influence is still being felt across the gaming industry.
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The Matrix Is the Best Hacker Movie
Most people point to Sneakers, Hackers, or WarGames. They’re all wrong. The Wachowskis actually invented the ultimate cyber superhero.
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The Jurassic Park Scene That Aged Poorly
"It's a UNIX system...I know this!"
According to Wired, UNIX actually is what a computer geek like Nedry would have used for Jurassic Park in 1993. But the scene where Lex "hacks" into the security system by typing extremely fast is very inaccurate and today looks unintentionally hilarious. Unlike common Hollywood portrayals of computer hacking, real hacking is often complicated and it's not something a 13-year-old would just know how to do simply because they use computers.
And where UNIX was once extremely modern technology, it now looks a lot simpler than the coding used in security systems today. Much of "Jurassic Park," like the velociraptors entering the kitchen, is still thrilling in 2021, but this scene simply didn't hold up well.
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Why V7 Unix matters so much
When I talk about things involving the history of Unix, I often wind up mentioning V7, also known as Seventh Edition of Research Unix from Bell Labs (for a recent example, in my entry on when Unix got stack size limits). If you're relatively new to the history of Unix, you might wonder why V7 keeps coming up so often. There are a number of reasons that V7 matters so much both for the history of Unix and for what is what we think of as being 'Unix' and the Unix way.
Unix and C were originally created and developed in the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center (CSRC) by various well known people like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The CSRC's release of V7 was a pivotal moment in the history of Unix, as it was both widely publicized and relatively widely distributed. This led to a number of effects, both practical and of perceptions.
First, V7 is effectively the common ancestor of various strains of Unix since then (this is not quite true for PWB, but close enough). Both BSD Unix and AT&T Unix (System III and System V) branched off from V7, so things in V7 were generally inherited by both of them, while things introduced after V7 (in some Unix line) had to make their way back and forth and didn't always migrate. This tends to be why I go back to V7 (and often no further) to see when something was introduced and if it was originally common to BSD Unix and System III/System V.
Second, V7 was where a lot of what we think of as the way Unix and C are was established. V7 is where we got the Bourne shell and a relatively modern dialect of C, including stdio; both the V6 shell and C were somewhat different, to the point that you couldn't necessarily compile V6 programs even on 1980s C compilers (never mind modern ones). In fact a lot of 'Unix' comes from V7, and it's probably the oldest Research Unix that would feel normal and familiar to us today as users of modern Unix.
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