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A History of Unix1965 - : Multics project begun as joint venture of AT&T, MIT, and GE to create a new operating system for the GE computer. 1969 - : AT&T Bell Labs researchers Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, J. F. Ossanna, and R. H. Canaday create a prototype file management system as an alternative to MULTICS. : Commercial systems at the time were written entirely in assembly language. One of the goals of unix is to have a small kernel written in assembler, and the rest in a high-level language. : Unix also has a hierarchical file system and a collection of utility programs. 1970 - : Jan 1 00:00:00 GMT 1970 - The Unix epoch, the point from which unix clocks measure time. : Brian Kernighan coins the name unics (UNiplexed Information and Computing System) : Unix development increases with the acquisition of a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) PDP-11, a state-of-the-art $65,000 computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM and 512 kilobytes of disk space. : Thompson develops B as an alternative to Fortran and BCPL. 1971 - : 1st Unix version, V1, used only within Bell Labs. : Needing to justify the cost of development, Unix is used (with the assembly-langfuage-coded troff) in the Bell Labs patent department as a one of the first word-processing programs. : B is improved upon and its successor is named C. 1972 - : M. D. McIlroy introduces the novel idea of 'pipes'. : June - V2 : 10 Unix installations. 1973 - : February - V3 - 16 Unix installations. : November - V4 is rewritten in C, easing the portability of Unix 1974 - : S. R. Bourne develops the Bourne Shell (/bin/sh, indicated with a '$') http://www.absint.com/aisee/manual/windows/node75.html : June - V5 Estimated 50 Unix installations. 1975 - : AT&T leases V6 to universities at low cost, making Unix use widespread. : Thompson spends year at UC Berkeley, leads development of a BSD variant of Unix. : UC Berkeley grad student Bill Joy (who later starts Sun Microsystems) develops the C-shell (/bin/csh, indicated with a '%') and the vi text editor. : TENEX-style C-shell developed (/bin/tcsh) (date?) : David Korn from AT&T develops the Korn shell (/bin/ksh) (date?) 1976 - : Emacs originally written by Richard Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs 1977 - : 1BSD released : Tom Duff and Byron Rakitzis develop the rc shell. (date?) 1978 - : Students at UC Berkeley, known as "Berkeley Software Distribution", develop their own variant of Unix, called BSD. : 2BSD released, 75 copies distributed. : 600 Unix installations worldwide. 1979 - : Private companies begin porting commercial versions of Unix. : BSD releases 3BSD. : AT&T releases the 40KB-kernel V7 : The system calls of V7: _exit, access, acct, alarm, brk, chdir, chmod, chown, chroot, close, creat, dup, dup2, exec*, exit, fork, fstat, ftime, getegid, geteuid, getgid, getpid, getuid, gtty, indir, ioctl, kill, link, lock, lseek, mknod, mount, mpxcall, nice, open, pause, phys, pipe, pkoff, pkon, profil, ptrace, read, sbrk, setgid, setuid, signal, stat, stime, stty, sync, tell, time, times, umask, umount, unlink, utime, wait, write. 1980 - : Microsoft releases Xenix, which is the first attempt to bring Unix to desktop computers. : October - BSD releases 4.0BSD 1982 - : AT&T releases their first commercial version of Unix, System III : Ksh was delivered working in 1982 to AT&T Bell labs http://www.kornshell.com/info/ 1983 - : Computer Research Group (CRG), UNIX System Group (USG), and Programmer's WorkBench (PWB) merge to become UNIX System Development Lab. : AT&T releases System V, incorporating Xenix and other variants. : BSD releases 4.2BSD which includes complete implementation of TCP/IP networking protocols, including telnet and ftp. : SVID, the System 5 Interface Definition, is released in an effort to standardize the Unix flavors as much as possible. 1984 - : Estimated 100,000 Unix installations worldwide. : U.S. government charges AT&T with monopolistic practices and AT&T is forced to divest its interests. : AT&T releases SVR2, incorporating many features from 4.2BSD : X/Open consortium of vendors founded, eventually known as The Open Group, gets UNIX trademark. : Richard Stallman develops GNU (GNU's Not UNIX) as a free Unix clone. http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html 1985 - : February - AT&T releases V8 : Paul Falstad develops zsh. (date?) 1986 - : September - AT&T releases V9 : DEC, which had been supporting VAX/VMS, is forced to ackowledge and support Unix as an inexpensive alternative. : Rc shell upgraded to es. (date?) 1987 - : Estimated 100,000 Unix installations worldwide. 1988 - : Unix International (UI) and Open Software Foundation (OSF) are formed. : SVR4 relases as a combo of System V, BSD, and SunOS. 1989 - : October - AT&T releases V10, the final version. : Wanting a free alternative to ksh, GNU advocates develop bash (Bourne-again shell). http://www.wlug.org.nz/bash(1) 1991 - : Unix Systems Laboratory (USL) spun off as a separate company, majority-owned by AT&T. : OSF releases OSF/1. : Linus Torvalds releases Linux kernel (Linus's Minix, pronounced 'lin-ux') 1992 - : July 14 - William and Lynne Jolitz release 386BSD as open source, eventually evolving into NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. 1993 - : 4.4BSD released as final Berkely release. : June 16 - Novell buys USL from AT&T. 1994 - : Torvalds and many others relase version 1.0 of the Linux kernel. Used with Stallman's GNU command-set, users around the world have access to a free Unix variant known as GNU/Linux, or just Linux. 1995 - : Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) buys USL from Novell : June - 4.4BSD Lite Release 2 the final distribution. 1996 - : OSF and X/Open merge to become The Open Group. 1997 - : The Open Group releases Single UNIX Specification, Version 2 1998 - : 20 million Unix installations worldwide. 1999 - : After years of growing hype about Linux, and Microsoft staunchly refusing to take part in the open source movement, many companies feel compelled to choose between developing software for Unix or for Windows NT. |
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