The UNIX : Bell Labs
UNIX which was originally called UNICS (UNiplexed Information and Computing Service). The grandfather of UNIX was CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System) and the father was the Multics (MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service) project which supports interactive timesharing for mainframe computers by huge communities of users.
UNIX was born at Bell Labs in 1969 by Ken Thompson and later Dennis Richie. These two great researchers and scientists worked to create an interactive timesharing system called the Multics.
Multics was created to combine timesharing with other technological advances, allowing the users to phone the computer from remote terminals, then edit documents, read e-mail, run calculations, and so on.
Over the next five years, AT&T corporate invested millions of dollars in the Multics project. They purchased mainframe computer called GE-645 and they dedicated to the effort of the top researchers at Bell Labs such as Ken Thompson, Stuart Feldman, Dennis Ritchie, M. Douglas McIlroy, Joseph F. Ossanna, and Robert Morris. The project was too ambitious, but it fell troublingly behind the schedule. And at the end, AT&T leaders decided to leave the project.
Bell Labs managers decided to stop any further work on operating systems which made many researchers frustrated and upset. But thanks to Thompson, Richie, and some researchers who ignored their bosses’ instructions and continued working with love on their labs, UNIX was created as one the greatest operating systems of all times.
UNIX started its life on a PDP-7 minicomputer which was a testing machine for Thompson’s ideas about the operating systems design and a platform for Thompsons and Richie’s game simulation that was called Space and Travel.
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. Dennis Richie Said.
UNIX has received its first funding for a PDP-11/20 in 1970, the UNIX operating system was then officially named and could run on the PDP-11/20. The first real job from UNIX was in 1971, it was to support word processing for the patent department at Bell Labs.
The C revolution on UNIX systems
Dennis Richie invented “C” in 1972, later he decided with Ken Thompson to rewrite the UNIX in “C” to give the system more portability options. They wrote and debugged almost 100,000 code lines that year. The migration to the “C” language resulted in highly portable software that require only a relatively small machine-dependent code to be then replaced when porting UNIX to another computing platform.
The UNIX was first formally presented to the outside world in 1973 on Operating Systems Principles, where Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson delivered a paper, then AT&T released Version 5 of the UNIX system and licensed it to the educational institutions, and then in 1975 they licensed Version 6 of UNIX to companies for the first time with a cost $20.000. The most widely used version of UNIX was Version 7 in 1980 where anybody could purchase a license but it was very restrictive terms in this license. The license included the source code, the machine dependents kernel which was written in PDP-11 assembly language. At all, versions of UNIX systems were determined by its user manuals editions.
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