The Story Behind The Development Of The UNIX Operating System

This article relates the story behind the development of the UNIX operating system — how it became the world’s most popular OS, the visionaries and organisations behind its success, and how it is related to the open source world.

All of us know that UNIX is the world’s first operating system and was developed at Bell Labs. Till date, it is the most powerful, versatile and flexible server operating system in the computing world.

The development of UNIX

In 1960, the AT&T Bell Laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric started developing a time-sharing operating system called MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) for mainframe computers. The project was ambitious, and development went on till early 1967. As it became very complex at this stage, the management at GE was dissatisfied with this system and decided to withdraw support to the project in the later part of 1967. In 1970, GE sold its computer business to Honeywell.

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were the programmers at the Bell Labs computing and research department who worked on project MULTICS from start to end. Thompson found an old PDP-7 machine, and developed his own application programs and operating system from scratch, aided by Ritchie and others. This operating system was renamed UNIX.

In November 1971, the first version of UNIX was released along with a book called ‘The UNIX Programmers Manual’. This was the systematic development approach at that time – a product would be released with proper documentation so that researchers could read the manual and look at the OS details.