Unix's birthday

[McHeath]

Unix, another Bell Labs creation, turns 40 in August.  Pretty amazing that a computer operating system written then is still so popular today.  (guess it's like those old phones they also cooked up at Bell Labs )

Here is a long article about Unix:

http://www.infoworld.com/t/unix/unix-turns-40-past-present-and-future-os-824?page=0,0


And here is a short summery of the article:

1969

AT&T-owned Bell Laboratories withdraws from development of Multics, a pioneering but overly complicated time-sharing system. Some important principles in Multics were to be carried over into Unix.

Ken Thompson at Bell Labs writes the first version of an as-yet-unnamed operating system in assembly language for a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer.

1970

Thompson's operating system is named Unics, for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, and as a pun on "emasculated Multics." (The name would later be mysteriously changed to Unix.)

Regardless of the ultimate fate of Unix, the operating system born at Bell Labs 40 years ago has established a legacy that's likely to endure for decades more. It can claim parentage of a long list of popular software, including the Unix offerings of IBM, HP and Sun, Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X and Linux. It has also influenced systems with few direct roots in Unix, such as Microsoft's Windows NT and the IBM and Microsoft versions of DOS.