A Brief History of Unix

Pre-history at Bell Telephone Labs (BTL)

• 1876 Alexander G. Bell (1847-1922) patents the "telephone"
• 1937 George Stibitz (1904-1995) (BTL) invents the binary boolean logic relay calculator (out of old relays, batteries, flashlight bulbs, wires and tin strips)
• 1947 William Shockley (1910-1989) (BTL) invents the transistor (most important invention of the 20th century), founds Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 in Palo Alto
• 1948 Claude Shannon (1916-2001) (BTL) creates Information Theory, Richard Hamming (1915-1998) (BTL) creates Coding Theory
• 1957 Sputnik stimulates ARPA, DEC releases the PDP-1 (50 KHz)
• 1961 Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS) on PDP-1 (BTL), John McCarthy (1927-) (MIT) invents packet switching
• 1968 GE evolves CTSS to Multics; [Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (1929-) found Intel]

  Birth at BTL

• 1969 Ken Thompson (1943-) (BTL) creates Unics (in assembler) to run Space Travel on a DEC PDP-7 (30 MHz, 4 K RAM)
  {4 weeks to write the OS (kernel), shell (sh), text editor (ed) and assembler (asm)}

  [MIT HACKERS, ARRPANET (UCLA, UCSB, SRI, UofU), phreaking and Linus Torvalds born]

• 1970 roff WP on PDP-11/20
• 1971 Unix Programmer's Manual (Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (1941-)) {60 cmds};
  Unix ownership: USG (BTL) -> USO (1989) -> Novell (1993) -> SCO (1995)
• 1972 Dennis Ritchie (BTL) B->C {toolbox design: streaming (piped) 1-task pgms}

  Development

• 1974 Steve Bourne (BTL) writes bash;
• 1975 V6 released to universities and government; (MS founded)
• 1976 Bill Joy (1954-) (UCB) writes vi
• 1977 BSD Unix; (Apple founded)
• 1979 C Programmer's Manual by Dennis Ritchie and Brain Kernighan published
• 1980 Xenix (MS); [IBM PC]
• 1982 Irix (SGI)
• 1983 Bjarne Stroustrup (1950-) creates C++; ksh
• 1984 Bell->ATT, Syst V VR1; X/open (MIT), TCP/IP, OSF
• 1986 HP-UX (HP)
• 1990 AIX (IBM)
• 1991 Linus Torvalds announces PC Linux: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
• 1994 Netscape, Red Hat, Caldera founded; first spam
• 1995 Apache, [E-Bay]
• 2001 MS files lawsuit against Lindows.com -> Linspire 2004 (runs MS apps); MAC OS X (Apple)
• 2005/6 ATT <-> SBC Communications

A Brief Unix Development Timeline

A Detailed Unix Development Timeline

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