[UFO Chicago] Happy Billennium!

[Jordan Bettis]

Hey, I don't know if you were celebrating tonight, but, as I write this, 
time_t equals 1000000430, four hundred and thirty seconds ago was one 
billion (10^9) seconds since zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds on 
January 1 1970, or the epoch of Unix time keeping!

Unix has come along way in the past billion seconds, and it has a very
bright future. No other system has, in my opinion, so fully embodied the
basic tenants of good system design as well as well as it has. The Unix
of time_t = 1000000000 is vastly different and more powerful than the
Unix of 1970 -- and that's the wisdom of Unix, it is extensible; it has
the ability to grow and mature as we develop new and better ways to do 
things. Unix realizes the ideal of any software system, that it should
help people do work, it should stay out of the way as much as possible.

How many people here have hacked together a shell or perl script that
makes their lives easier, then marveled at how easy it was? Imagine
trying to do that on more 'user friendly' systems. But even 
intuitiveness is something that Unix can attain, witness Mac OSX, 
Gnome, and KDE. These systems don't try to limit the user to make 
things simpler, they simply extend Unix in yet another direction.

Not only that, but Unix has always been one of the most important refuges
of Free Software. The original Unix was distributed under a non-free but
very unrestricted license. BSD, which was one of the biggest steps forward
in Unix functionality, was also a major step forward with its free license.
Is it any wonder that RMS decided to make GNU a Unix clone? Or that that
clone, with the free Linux kernel at its core, would lead Unix into its
new renaissance?

Bc informs me that 1 billion seconds is about 31.7 years. That's a long time,
especially in the computer world, but let's make the next billion seconds
even better than the last!

--
Jordan Bettis <http://www.hafd.org/~jordanb>
 E Pluribus Unix