Unix History: A Mighty Origin Story

upstart writes:

A brief walk down memory lane about Unix and its beginning:

The world today runs on Linux. Billions of mobile phones and servers today run Linux. But before Linux, there was Unix, and without it, Linux would not have existed today.

Unix's origin can be traced back to the moon landing days. In 1965, three famous institutions started a joint venture to create an operating system that could serve multiple users and share data and resources.

They are the famous Bell Telephone Laboratories, the General Electric Company and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This project or the joint venture is called "Multics" - an acronym for "Multiplex Information and Computing Service".

But, the project did not see much success. Unfortunately. Due to complexity and poor outcome, Bell Labs discontinued the project.

Ken Thomson from Bell Labs, who worked in Multics, started afresh. He started writing a new operating system for an ancient computer PDP-7 of Digital Equipment Corporation. Later, Dennis Ritchie joined, and they created a hierarchical file system, device files, command line interpreter and processes. This is how the Unix was born, named by another member of the Multics project - Brian Kernighan.

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