Unix System facts
While investigating facts about Unix System, I found out little known, but curios details like:
The infamous "It's a UNIX system!" scene in Jurassic Park is using an actual 3D file explorer called fsn.
The creators of UNIX came up with the name as a pun implying the word "Eunuchs", as it was to be an emasculated version of the MULTICS operating system.
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 26 of the best facts about Unix System I managed to collect.
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The 'Year 2038 Problem" which is that because of the way that Unix systems tracks time they cannot go past 19 January 2038 and will instead go backwards to 1901.
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Dennis Richie, who along with Ken Thompson, created the C programming language in the 60s, the most influential language in history, as well as Unix (THE operating system behind MacOS and Linux), died a week after Steve Jobs in 2011. His death was ignored due to media coverage of Jobs' death.
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Unix, which forms the backbone for nearly every single computer system in the world, was originally created to make shoot-em-up games after a platform called Multics fell through
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Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the CCD (image sensor), information theory, the operating system Unix, and the programming languages C and C++. Oh and they've won 8 Nobel Prizes.
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The infamous "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" scene from 1993's Jurassic Park is not far from fiction. The three-dimensional interface was actually a real, albeit infinished, application by Silicon Graphics (for UNIX of course) and not an unrealistic mockup, contrary to popular belief.
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Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the CCD, information theory, the operating systems Unix and Plan 9, and the programming languages C, C++, and S. Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Labs.
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At 15:30:08 UTC on 4 December 292,277,026,596 AD , time on 64-Bit Unix Systems will fail .
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Apple used to have a Unix-based OS called A/UX that ran on their 68k macs, but it was abandoned and Apple bought Steve Jobs's company NeXT to get their Unix-based NeXTSTEP operating system instead.
What is true about unix system?
You can easily fact check it by examining the linked well-known sources.
The Year 2038 problem, where systems that wrap their UNIX time counters and storing it as 32-bit signed integer will reach its maximum capacity (2,147,483,647 seconds after 1 January 1970), the number will wrap around to become -2147483647 and will mean 13 December 1901 on these systems
In the notorious Jurassic Park scene in which Lex Murphy proclaims "It's a UNIX system!" the UNIX system wasn't just Hollywood special effects hand-waving, it was a real UNIX OS using a 3D interface. - source
The 2038 problem, a Y2K-like bug that will occur on UNIX computer systems in the year 2038. It will affect vital systems such as nuclear power plants. - source
Running 'yes fuck' on a UNIX system makes the system print 'fuck' forever (or until the program is killed). - source
The DWARF data format is a medieval fantasy complement to "ELF", the common executable file format for Unix-like systems, and isn't an acronym for anything.
In exactly 19 years there could be another Y2K like event. Time encoding in computers will break due to an integer overflow with the 32 bit Unix time system, rendering any computer still using the system broken.
On January 19, 2038 the Unix Timestamp will cease to work. Millions of applications will need to either adopt a new convention for time stamps or be migrated to 64-bit systems which will buy the timestamp a "bit" more time.
In Jurassic Park the goofy graphical file system we all made fun of was a real thing. It was part of a UNIX based professional graphics workstation called the SGI Indigo2. ILM and other studios used these to create the effects for movies like Jurassic Park itself, as well as T2 and The Abyss.
The Northeast Blackout of 2003 was caused by a race condition in GE's Unix based Energy Management System
