Unix, one of the most important pieces of software ever created, will turn forty this summer. To commemorate this computerworld wrote up a nice story on the early days of Unix. How the first version came to be and how it became portable to other systems as well…

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.

There’s also another article which has the Unix timeline. A nice read as well.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 7:29 and is filed under computer, unix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.