History of UNIX UNIX rose from the rubbish pile left over by an ill-fated MIT research project in the mid-1960s. MIT's goal was to create a convenient interactive operating system that allowed timesharing on mainframe computers. General Electric and Bell Labs (now Lucent Technologies) joined the project, named Multics, in 1965. The project failed to produce a workable system, and Bell Labs withdrew in 1969. A few Bell Labs researchers, notably Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, continued to work on the project. Thompson and Ritchie desperately needed a computer to try their ideas out on, but without a concrete plan Bell Labs wasn't ready to spend the money for a new computer system. In desperation, the researchers began to implement their ideas on an old Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-7 minicomputer that served almost exclusively as their gaming platform. (The only game that could be played was a text-based game called "Space Travel" that they translated into PDP assembly language on paper tapes. Ouch.) The first assembler for the new operating system was completed in early 1970, and later that year Brian Kernighan coined the name "UNIX" as a pun on Multics. And so UNIX was born. The development of UNIX rapidly accelerated in 1970 after Bell Labs bought a new PDP-11 system for Thompson and Ritchie to work with. The first user of UNIX was Bell Labs' patent department, who used the system for basic text processing. Other departments at Bell Labs quickly followed the patent department's lead. The original version of UNIX was written in assembly language, but Thompson wisely decided that the operating system should be written in a high-level language to make it easier to update and maintain. The initial attempt was made with FORTRAN, but failed. Kernighan and Ritchie developed the C programming language in 1971, and UNIX was rewritten in C during the summers of 1972 and 1973. While Bell Labs made extensive use of UNIX in the mid-1970s, very few other organizations did. Bell began distributing UNIX to academia in 1975, but only a few Universities took advantage of it. During the winter of 1976-77, Thompson taught a class at the University of California's Berkeley campus. In the process he convinced a large portion of the Computer Science department at UCB that UNIX was the best solution for their operating system needs. Excited by its potential, a group of UCB faculty and students formed the Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) and began writing extensions for the UNIX distributed by Bell Labs. These extensions eventually became their own flavor of UNIX known as the Berkeley Standard Distribution, or BSD. The CSRG developed a TCP/IP implementation for UNIX, that combined with its low cost made it the platform of choice for the Internet in the late 1970s. Several versions of UNIX were released between 1975 and 1984 that added successively complex tools for both scientific research and business. In 1984 Bell Labs was spun off from its parent company, AT&T, and released the first version of "modern" UNIX called System V. During the late 1980s there were several different flavors of UNIX available - in fact, almost every workstation vendor wrote their own. Since vendors added their own proprietary extensions, UNIX became very confusing very quickly. By 1988, the rival companies had pretty much fallen into two categories - vendors either used a version of UNIX based on the "pure" Bell Labs releases, or based on Berkeley's extensions. In an attempt to standardize all of the UNIX flavors, Sun Microsystems and other vendors released System V Release 4 in 1994. This release of System V combined the features of Bell Labs' UNIX with the Berkeley extensions, and is what most modern UNIX distributions are based upon today. Today UNIX remains a major force in both desktop and large-scale computing. It is still the operating system of choice for Internet servers, large businesses, universities, and the scientific research community. |
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