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Unix

Multics served as a significant source of inspiration for Unix. Ken Thompson, who enjoyed Multics flexibility, sought to create a simpler operating system that could run on less powerful machines. He decided to implement the best ideas from Multics on a smaller scale.

  • Starting in 1969, Thompson ported a simple file-and-process system (initially for his “Space Game”) to a little-used PDP-7.
  • By 1970 he and Ritchie had built a toolkit of utilities (editor, assembler, shell) and adopted the name UNIX1
  • In 1971 they moved Unix onto the PDP-11 and rewrote almost all of it in the new C language, making Unix unusually portable
  • Early versions (such as Version 6 and Version 7 UNIX) spread to academic sites (e.g. UC Berkeley) and later became commercialized by AT&T in the mid-1970s

Key founders and collaborators included Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Doug McIlroy and Joe Ossanna.

  1. The name "UNICS" (UNiplexed Information and Computing Service), a pun on "Multics" (Multiplexed Information and Computer Services), was suggested by Brian Kernighan in 1970 and eventually shortened to Unix. ↩