Development of Unix

Abstract

The forefathers of all current varians of the multiuser multitasking operating system Unix are Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. In 1969, in the laboratories of the North American telephone company AT&T, they developed the first Unix prototype, then still written in Assembler, on a PDP-7 system manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The name “Unix” first derived from a pun MULTICS, which was one og the first interactive operating systems. Based on the idea of creating a system, that would support the cooperation of several programmers in the team communication between them, Thompson and Ritchie conceived the “UNiplexed Information and Computing System” Unics.