27 February,2009 08:18 AM IST | | Balaji Narasimhan
Operating systems may come and operating systems may go, but this operating system seems to go on for ever
Forty years ago, in 1969, employees of Bell Labs led by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie put together an operating system called UNIX. While most modern operating systems are created and executed meticulously to plan, UNIX was not in fact, it came about thanks to the failure of another project called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service).
After Multics failed, Ken Thompson wrote a game for that system called Space Travel and, since he was not happy with its performance, he rewrote it in assembly language for DEC's PDP-7 along with Dennis Ritchie. Soon thereafter, Ritchie and Thompson created a new multi-tasking operating system, complete with a command line interpreter and some small utility programs. And thus UNIX was born.
Until this time, the development had been done by the programmers, with no support from Bell Labs. To get the company involved, Thompson and Ritchie said that they would incorporate text processing capabilities in UNIX for a newer PDP-11/20 machine and did it by adding a text formatting program called roff.
And thus an operating system was born. Or, should we say, a legend?
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Meet the founders: Ken Thompson created UNIX in 1969 |
Meet the founders: Dennis Ritchie created UNIX in 1969 |
When history was made: Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson porting UNIX to the PDP-11 |
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X marks the spot: While programmers liked the Spartan '$' prompt, users needed a lot more, and this was provided by graphical systems like X-Windows |
The lord of the rings: UNIX has a kernel core on top of which runs the program shell, and tools and applications run on the shell. This protects the kernel from rogue programs and makes the OS exceedingly robust. |
Not sexy, but functional: In UNIX, you don't press F1, you type man (for manual). This command gives you help on all commands, including man itself |
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