History of Unix

Unix

Evolution of Unix and Unix-like systems
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	1969; 55 years ago (1969)
Available in	English
Kernel type	Monolithic
Default user interface	Command-line interface & Graphical (X Window System)
License	Proprietary
Official website	opengroup.org/unix

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.^[1] Multics introduced many innovations, but also had many problems. Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics – among them Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna^[2] – decided to redo the work, but on a much smaller scale.^[3]

In 1979, Ritchie described the group's vision for Unix:^[3]

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.