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History of UNIX

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others at Bell Labs created the first version of the Unix operating system in 1969 on a PDP-7 minicomputer. Unix was rewritten in C in 1972-1973, making it the first widely used OS that could switch hardware. The seventh edition of Unix was released in 1979 and became the grandfather of all extant Unix systems. In the late 1980s through 1990s, variants of Unix like BSD and System V competed until features were adopted across both.

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188 views1 page

History of UNIX

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others at Bell Labs created the first version of the Unix operating system in 1969 on a PDP-7 minicomputer. Unix was rewritten in C in 1972-1973, making it the first widely used OS that could switch hardware. The seventh edition of Unix was released in 1979 and became the grandfather of all extant Unix systems. In the late 1980s through 1990s, variants of Unix like BSD and System V competed until features were adopted across both.

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rahulchivane
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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THE HISTORY OF UNIX

1969 The Beginning


The history of UNIX starts back in 1969, when Ken Thompson, Dennis
Ritchie and others started working on the “little-used PDP-7 in a corner” at
Bell Labs and what was to become UNIX.
• The PDP-7 was a minicomputer, which was shipped by Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC). Its greatest claim to fame by far is that it is the computer
for which the first version of UNIX was created
• Bell Labs distributed UNIX in its source code form, so anyone who used UNIX
could customize it as needed
• Microsoft DOS and Microsoft Windows adopted original UNIX design
concepts, such as the idea of a shell--an interface between the user and the
operating system--and the hierarchical structure of directories and
subdirectories

In 1972-1973
The system was rewritten in the programming language C, an unusual step that
was visionary: due to this decision Unix was the first widely used operating
system that could switch from and outlive its original hardware. Other
innovations were added to Unix as well, in part due to synergies between Bell
Labs and the academic community

In 1979
The “seventh edition” (V7) version of Unix was released, grandfather of all extant
Unix systems.
After this point, the history of Unix becomes somewhat convoluted. The
academic community, led by Berkeley, developed a variant called the Berkeley
Software
Distribution (BSD), while AT&T continued developing Unix under the names
“System III” and later “System V”.

In the late 1980's through early 1990's


The “wars” between these two major strains raged. After many years each variant
adopted many of the key features of the other. Commercially, System V won the
“standards wars” (getting most of its interfaces into the formal standards), and
most hardware vendors switched to AT&T's System V.
✦The result was many different versions of Unix, all based on the original seventh
edition.

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