Jonathan Moreton

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The History of UNIX

• Jonathan Moreton
• jbm6_at_aber.ac.uk

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Introduction

• Early days
• Multics, the answer?
• The birth of UNIX
• The advancements of UNIX
• The different versions BSD and UNIX
• Variations of UNIX.

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Early Days

• Computers didn't talk to each other.
• Even the various computer lines made by the same
  company often needed interpreters
• Forget any interoperability of systems by
  different vendors!
• Operating systems written for a specific
  computer.
• Each time a new machine was bought a new
  operating system was on it.
• Meaning a company had to input their data each
  time.

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Multics, the answer?

• (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service)
  mainframe time sharing system.
• A group of computer scientists from Bell Labs and
  GE in 1965 joined an effort under way at MIT.
• most of the group initially failed and Bell Labs
  withdrew in 1969.
• Multics actually worked but not initially on the
  scale the developers wanted.

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The birth of UNIX

• The basic UNIX was written on a PDP-7 in the
  summer of 1969 by Ken Thompson.
• It consisted of operating system, the shell, the
  editor and the assembler.
• Before the creation of the assembler all programs
  were written on a GECOS and transferred to the
  PDP-7 by paper tape.
• It wasn't until well into 1970 that the name UNIX
  was suggested by Brian Kernighan on what was a
  treacherous pun on Multics.

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The advancements of UNIX

• The first version of UNIX was written in assembly
  language.
• Thompson created a new language called B based on
  the word-orientated BCPL.
• This converted to early C by adding types
• Due to the fact that early C didn't contain
  structures,
• Advancements to the compiler code and structures
  were added to C.

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Further advancements and BSD

• Due to the advancements of C UNIX was ported to
  C, Pipes () were also developed.
• Ken Thompson took a 6 month sabbatical to teach
  at Berkeley and taught UNIX.
• When he left students and professors continued to
  work on improving UNIX eventually creating BSD
  (Berkeley Software Distribution) 4.2.

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Variants of UNIX

• Linux
• BSD FreeBSD, NetBSD
• Mac OS X

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Conclusion

• UNIX still is used mainly UNIX runs on servers
  and web servers.
• But it may have never happened if not for the
  people at bell labs.
• This is not the complete history, It is far more
  detailed.

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References

• http//www.bell-labs.com/history/unix Bell labs
  UNIX history pages

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Any Questions?