Name: Anonymous 2017-05-16 1:41
The thing about analogizing the history of Unix with that of Christianity is that Christianity was dominant in its society for millenia, and I'm not sure Unix ever was. At least outside of academia, through the end of the 20th century and years into the 21st, it was always in an environment dominated by other operating systems (Windows, VMS, OS/360 and successors) which regarded it as a barely-tolerated intruder at best. Rather like the Jews.
So, if we analogize Unix to Rabbinic Judaism, what of the rest of the pre-history?
You can push the pre-history of these things further back: MULTICS was a designed successor to the earlier Compatible Time Sharing System. (Compatible with what? Batch Fortran, so far as I can tell.) And CTSS had an influence on the shape of Unix, too. Unix absorbed in toto its conception of what a computer utility ought to be, with files owned by individual users, an editor that could handle any sort of text, compilers that dealt with editor-format files as source code, the original RUNOFF text formatting program, and even a manual divided into multi-page "pages", each describing an individual program or library routine, with a synopsys of operation right at the top. Someone had to invent all that stuff; CTSS was where it happened.
So, if that's how things started, what of the others? MULTICS is the Judaism of the temple priests, an elaborate, ritualistic version of the original concept, full of pomp, ceremony, and elaborate totems, now defunct. Other timesharing systems that took similar ideas from CTSS (and similar university timesharing systems of the time) are Samaritans --- preserving the same holy writ, or something very much like it, but not adapting to the times and barely hanging on.
Which would make current Unix-alikes splinters of Rabbinic Judaism. And from Hasidim (including the hard-core Haredi who live in Israel while denying its legitimacy, since the Messiah hasn't come yet), to Orthodox, to various flavors of Reform and Reconstructionist... the problem with drawing analogies to individual flavors of tech is that there's just too many choices!
So, if we analogize Unix to Rabbinic Judaism, what of the rest of the pre-history?
You can push the pre-history of these things further back: MULTICS was a designed successor to the earlier Compatible Time Sharing System. (Compatible with what? Batch Fortran, so far as I can tell.) And CTSS had an influence on the shape of Unix, too. Unix absorbed in toto its conception of what a computer utility ought to be, with files owned by individual users, an editor that could handle any sort of text, compilers that dealt with editor-format files as source code, the original RUNOFF text formatting program, and even a manual divided into multi-page "pages", each describing an individual program or library routine, with a synopsys of operation right at the top. Someone had to invent all that stuff; CTSS was where it happened.
So, if that's how things started, what of the others? MULTICS is the Judaism of the temple priests, an elaborate, ritualistic version of the original concept, full of pomp, ceremony, and elaborate totems, now defunct. Other timesharing systems that took similar ideas from CTSS (and similar university timesharing systems of the time) are Samaritans --- preserving the same holy writ, or something very much like it, but not adapting to the times and barely hanging on.
Which would make current Unix-alikes splinters of Rabbinic Judaism. And from Hasidim (including the hard-core Haredi who live in Israel while denying its legitimacy, since the Messiah hasn't come yet), to Orthodox, to various flavors of Reform and Reconstructionist... the problem with drawing analogies to individual flavors of tech is that there's just too many choices!