Operating Systems
Unix: The 40 year timeline
Milestones in the life of an OS
By Gary Anthes, Computerworld | Computerworld US | Published 14:00, 04 June 09
Ever wonder about how Unix got started, not to mention all the twists and turns it took along the way? Here are some milestones of the operating system's four-decade-long history.
1956
Also in this channel
Virtualisation, Big Data and BYOD
Check out our Business IT Hub for opinions and briefings. Read more
A U.S. Department of Justice consent decree enjoins AT&T from "engaging ... in any business other than the furnishing of common carrier communication services."
1969
Mar. -- AT&T-owned Bell Laboratories withdraws from development of Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), a pioneering but overly complicated time-sharing system. Some important principles in Multics will be carried over into Unix.
Aug. -- Ken Thompson at Bell Labs writes the first version of an as-yet-unnamed operating system, in assembly language for a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer.
1970
Thompson's operating system is named Unics, for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service and a pun on "emasculated Multics." (The name is later mysteriously changed to Unix.)
1971
Feb. -- Unix moves to the new Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-11 minicomputer.
Nov. -- The first edition of the "Unix Programmer's Manual," written by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, is published.
1972
Dennis Ritchie develops the C programming language.
1973
Unix matures. The "pipe," a mechanism for sharing information between two programs, which will influence operating systems for decades, is added to Unix. Unix is rewritten from assembler into C.
1974
Jan. -- The University of California at Berkeley receives a copy of Unix.
July -- "The UNIX Timesharing System," by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, appears in the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The authors call it "a general-purpose, multi-user, interactive operating system." The article produces the first big demand for Unix.
1976
Bell Labs programmer Mike Lesk develops UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy Program) for network transfer of files, e-mail and Usenet content.
1977
Unix is ported to non-DEC hardware: Interdata 8/32 and IBM 360.
1978
Bill Joy, a graduate student at Berkeley, sends out copies of the first Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD), essentially Bell Labs' Unix V6 with some add-ons. BSD becomes a rival Unix branch to AT&T's Unix; its variants and eventual descendents include FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DEC Ultrix, SunOS, NeXTstep/OpenStep and Mac OS X.
