In 1969 Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie developed the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. This was the first operating system designed to run on computers of all sizes, making open systems possible. UNIX became the foundation for the Internet.
"The origins of Unix date back to the mid-1960s when the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Bell Labs, and
General Electric were developing
Multics, a
time-sharing operating system for the
GE-645 mainframe computer.
[14] Multics featured
several innovations, but also presented severe problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics, but not by its goals, individual researchers at Bell Labs started withdrawing from the project. The last to leave were
Ken Thompson,
Dennis Ritchie,
Douglas McIlroy, and
Joe Ossanna,
[10] who decided to reimplement their experiences in a new project of smaller scale. This new operating system was initially without organizational backing, and also without a name.
"The new operating system was a single-tasking system.
[10] In 1970, the group coined the name
Unics for
Uniplexed Information and Computing Service (pronounced "
eunuchs"), as a
pun on
Multics, which stood for
Multiplexed Information and Computer Services.
Brian Kernighan takes credit for the idea, but adds that "no one can remember" the origin of the final spelling
Unix.
[15] Dennis Ritchie,
[10] Doug McIlroy,
[1] and
Peter G. Neumann[16] also credit Kernighan.
"The operating system was originally written in
assembly language, but in 1973, Version 4 Unix was rewritten in
C.
[10] Version 4 Unix, however, still had many
PDP-11 dependent codes, and was not suitable for porting. The first port to another platform was made five years later (1978) for the
Interdata 8/32.
[17]"Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are collectively referred to as "
Research Unix". In 1975, the first source license for
UNIX was sold to
Donald B. Gillies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Department of Computer Science.
[18] UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson, who had worked on the UNIX kernel at Bell Labs, was instrumental in negotiating the terms of the license.
[19]"During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix (
BSD and
System V) by commercial startups, which in turn led to Unix fragmenting into multiple, similar but often slightly mutually-incompatible systems including
DYNIX,
HP-UX,
SunOS/
Solaris,
AIX, and
Xenix. In the late 1980s, AT&T
Unix System Laboratories and
Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4 (
SVR4), which was subsequently adopted by many commercial Unix vendors.
Jeremy Norman’s
_and_Dennis_Ritchie_at_PDP-11_(2876612463).jpg){kind=link}