History of UNIX

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History of UNIX

UNIX, created by a group of AT&T employees for Bell Labs has been in use for over three decades. This operating system was first developed using assembly language but by the early 1970's was completely created on C which proved to be ideal since it allowed greater assimilation and greater flexibility as an operating system in the computer world. Today, UNIX is used widely in mobile systems, servers and workstations. The Internet owes its development and success to UNIX.

Early operating systems were very limited in terms of what they were able to perform and were limited by what they were written to perform. If a business upgraded to a bigger, more powerful computer, the old operating system probably wouldn't work on the new computer, and often the company's data had to be reentered into the new machine. "To try to develop a convenient, interactive, useable computer system that could support many users, a group of computer scientists from Bell Labs and GE in 1965 joined an effort underway at MIT on what was called the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) mainframe timesharing system" (Alcatel-Lucent, 2011). As time went by, the group effort initially failed to produce an economically useful system. Bell Labs withdrew from the effort in 1969 but a small band of users at Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center in Murray Hill -- Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna (Alcatel-Lucent, 2011)-- continued to look for answers.

History of UNIX: Please include these timelines when assembling your paper
?Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna (Wikipedia, 2011), all employees of AT&T first developed UNIX in 1969 for Bell Labs on the "little-used PDP-7 in a corner" (TOG, 2010).
?By 1971, It had a assembler for a PDP-11/20, file system, fork(), roff and ed (TOG, 2010). At this time, it was used primarily for the purposes of text processing of patent documents. This First Addition of UNIX included over 60 commands like: b (compile B program); boot (reboot system); cat (concatenate files); chdir (change working directory); chmod (change access mode); chown (change owner); cp (copy file); ls (list directory contents); mv (move or rename file); roff (run off text); wc (get word count); who (who is one the system). The main thing missing was pipes (Computer Hope, 2011)
?In 1972, the Second Edition was released rewritten in the C programming language. This change allowed the software to become more portable requiring only a relatively small amount of machine-dependent code to be replaced when porting UNIX to other computing platforms (Wikipedia, 2011).
?Both the Third and Fourth Editions of Unix were released in 1973; the former in February and the latter in November. It was in 1973 as well that UNIX had been installed on 16 sites all within AT&T/Western Electric (Computer Hope, 2011).
?In 1974, the Fifth Edition of Unix was released.
?The Sixth Edition was released in 1975. Also known as Version 6, it was the first to be widely available outside of Bell Labs. The first BSD version (1.x) was derived from V6. Version 6 led to a plethora of different UNIX versions both inside and outside Bell Labs, including PWB/UNIX and the first commercial UNIX, IS/1. As more of UNIX was rewritten in C, portability also increased (Wikipedia, 2011).
?The Seventh Edition was released in 1979 and was a progress over all previous and following versions. It had C, UUCP and the Bourne shell. It was ported to the VAX and the kernel was ...