AT&T before 1981 breakup
- is a government regulated monopoly
- has a steady revenue from telephone service
- had agreed not to engage in commercial computing

UNIX Created at AT&T's Bell Labs in New Jersey
- by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie
- UNIX is a pun on MULTICS (Bell work on MULTICS canceled in 1969)
- for use only with Bell Labs

- design goal: an easy way of file sharing
- was not a complete OS
- rather a set of file manipulation tools
- "pipes" connect output of one process to input of another
- programs could produce executable code, replicate themselves, etc.
- it's not a system for casual users

- initial UNIX on PDP-7
- then PDP-11 in C

UNIX was welcomed by university CS departments
- universities could get a license for several hundred dollars
- AT&T presents UNIX as an "open" system
- AT&T subsidiary Western Union supplied source code for a fee
- source code was written in C
- it was OK to enhance UNIX
- students provide good, cheap labor for drivers, etc.
- students got hands on experience
- took that experience into the corporate world

Many omissions.....

1974: UC Berkeley gets a UNIX tape and a visit from Ken Thompson
- UNIX is soon running on PDP-11's
- Bill Joy arrives
- replace Model 33 teletypes by dumb terminals

1978 Joy offers Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)

- UNIX is ported to DEC VAX

1980 Berkeley UNIX gets ARPA support
- is recommended to ARPA clients
- Version 4.2 BSD contains TCP/IP
- VAXen and PDP-11's abound on the ARPANET
- helps transform ARPANET to Internet

More details....
- History by Lucent Technologies, formerly Bell Labs
- History by Dennis Richie
- Family tree
- History and Timeline from www.unix.org

Notes

Selected Works of Unix

Dennis M. Ritchie and Kenneth Thomspson, "The UNIX Time-Sharing System," Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (Association for Computing Machinery, 1973 Oct 15-17). This is the original Unix paper.

Dennis M. Ritchie and Kenneth Thomspson, "The UNIX Time-Sharing System (Revised)," The Bell System Technical Journal 57, no. 6, part 2 (AT&T, 1978 Jul-Aug). Also available online at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/cacm.html (AT&T, accessed 2004 Nov 20). This paper has a note that tells how it is related to the original 1973 Unix paper.

1. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Basic Books, 1996).

2. Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).