Happy 40th Birthday UNIX!

by Vivek Gite on June 7, 2009 · 4 comments

UNIX turns 40 - in 1969 group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna developed UNIX. Today Unix offered in many flavors and developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors (such as IBM, HP, Sun, Apple etc) and non-profit organizations. CW article concluded that after four decades, the future of the operating system is clouded, but its legacy will endure in form of Linux and Microsoft NT operating system:

In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer at AT&T subsidiary Bell Laboratories, saw the month-long departure of his wife and young son as an opportunity to put his ideas for a new operating system into practice. He wrote the first version of Unix in assembly language for a wimpy Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) PDP-7 minicomputer, spending one week each on the operating system, a shell, an editor and an assembler.


On a related note go and read "A Quarter Century of UNIX" book. It is based on interviews with the key software engineers who invented and built this powerful operating system, this book provides unique insight into the most important operating system in the modern computing environment.

=> Unix turns 40: The past, present and future of a revolutionary OS (via slashdot)

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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Peko June 8, 2009

Good to recall – Thanks Buddy !

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2 Ulver June 8, 2009

is really nice recognize this kind of dates, i think that it remebers which is the origin of the origin .

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3 Mike C June 8, 2009

Thats a real good story to celebrate, and ill repeat that is great date to remember, nothing better than that never more.. excellent !!

Reply

4 Elmano June 19, 2009

Nothing like own source of power

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