Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

I booted UNIX V4 (first C rewrite) in a PDP‑11 emulator. It feels tactile—no backspace, staggered print, slower typing, and it forced me to slow down. Classic Unix tools (ls, cat, ed, cal, dc) and ...

UNIX version 4 is quite special on account of being the first UNIX to be written in C instead of PDP-11 ASM, but it was also considered to have been lost to the ravages of time. Joyfully, we can ...

The “What’s the difference between UNIX and Linux?” question can be answered similar to the analogy section that many of us had to complete on the SAT test; UNIX is to DOS as Linux is to Windows. That ...

The Unix operating system is one of computing's most significant technologies, providing the framework that the familiar Linux and Mac OS X operating systems were developed on. Unix can be a viable ...

Early Sunday morning in Greenwich, England, the clock that keeps Universal Time will strike 01:46:40 -- the 40th second of the 46th minute in the second hour of Sept. 9, 2001. That instant will be an ...

COMMENTARY--Whoever said the first casualty of war is truth would be surprised to find that apothegm quoted in a dispute between systems vendors. But it is an apt description of current events. The ...

It probably shouldn’t, but it routinely astonishes me how much we live on the Web. Even I find myself going entire boots without using anything but the Web browser. With such an emphasis on Web-based ...

Linus Torvalds once said, in reference to the development of Linux, that he “had hoisted [himself] up on the shoulders of giants.” Among those giants, Dennis Ritchie (aka dmr) was likely the tallest.

Most breaches don’t start with malware or zero-day exploits. They start with a login.  An attacker gets hold of a password, maybe through phishing, reuse, or a leaked credential dump. They test it ...