Abstract
In April 1969, as part of AT&T’s withdrawal from the Multics project, the researchers involved had their “pleasant” development environment taken from them. Bereft of their “toy”, the ex-Multics researchers began to cast about for a replacement. Having found nothing suitable, Ken Thompson chose to write one from scratch. By the middle of 1969, he had created a self-hosting operating system on a discarded PDP-7 minicomputer. This was Unix, an operating system whose legacy remains with us today. This paper looks at the creation of Unix after AT&T’s departure from the Multics project, the features and innovations in the PDP-7 version of Unix, and the work done in 2016 to restore a working version of PDP-7 Unix from the available source code.
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Many warnings are issued at this stage.
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Toomey, W. (2018). Unix: Building a Development Environment from Scratch. In: De Mol, L., Primiero, G. (eds) Reflections on Programming Systems. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 133. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97226-8_7
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