SL Baur's Journal: A brief history of Unix

Unix was created by Ken & Dennis after coming off of the Multics project. Unix is a "weak pun" on Multics. Ken Thompson needed something to run a space war game on a shiny new PDP 7. Dennis Ritchie wrote a compiler for him. Deciding they needed to prove to their managers that they were really working, they sold the project to management as a document writing platform. Dennis Ritchie wrote the first file system (the setuid bit patent bears his name). Joe Ossanna wrote troff. The memory pressure that troff brought to bear on the system lead them to divide i & d space thus bringing the total process memory to a whopping 128k.

Writing the kernel mostly in a high level language proved to be a stroke of genius that would change the computing world forever, though it would take another decade and a half for the rest of the world to figure this out.

Dennis Ritchie's compiler was never ported away from the PDP. Steve Johnson wrote the "portable C compiler" which would ultimately inspire gcc.

Due to AT&T's status as a telephone monopoly, they were not allowed to commercialize the system. That wouldn't come until the 1980s and they did that as badly as they anything non-technical - "AT&T couldn't market eternal life".

Because they couldn't market the system, it was distributed as source code to Universities and eventually folks at Berkeley picked it up and hacked on it to produce BSD. Source licenses were typical through the 1980s. My first official on-the-job experience with Unix in 1987 was on a Pyramid that had a hybrid interface divided into universes (with source code). You could either select a BSD-ish or a System V-ish style system interface. Sadly, Pyramid did not revolutionize the world, but they were awesome machines for their time.

The earliest Unix box I got my hands on personally was a Stride 440 running a beta System V/R2 in 1985. Sadly, their Unix port never supported the bit mapped graphics that their hardware supported. The AT&T 3B1 aka Unix PC, which was the first commercial Unix desktop, predated Microsoft Windows and did support bitmapped graphics and a mouse, but was marketed very badly. It didn't become particularly reasonable to buy until after it was EOLed.

Oh Unix, how I love thee (and how good you look on my Macbook Pro) ...