History of Unix
Evolution of Unix and Unix-like systems
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| Developer | Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna at Bell Labs |
|---|---|
| Written in | C and Assembly language |
| OS family | Unix |
| Working state | Current |
| Source model | Historically closed source, now some Unix projects (BSD family and Illumos) are open sourced. |
| Initial release | 1973 |
| Available in | English |
| Kernel type | Monolithic |
| Default user interface | Command-line interface & Graphical (X Window System) |
| License | Proprietary |
| Official website | unix.org |
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but had many problems.
Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not the aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna among others, decided to redo the work on a much smaller scale. In 1979, Dennis Ritchie described their vision for Unix:
What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.
In the late 1960s, Bell Labs was involved in a project with MIT and General Electric to develop a time-sharing system, called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (Multics), allowing multiple users to access a mainframe simultaneously. Dissatisfied with the project's progress, Bell Labs management ultimately withdrew.
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