Unix

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UNIX was originally developed at Bell Laboratories as a private research project by a small group of people starting in 1969. This group had experience with a number of different operating systems research efforts in the 1970's. The goals of the group were to design an operating system to satisfy the following objectives:

   * Simple and elegant
   * Written in a high level language rather than assembly language
   * Allow re-use of code

Typical vendor operating systems of the time were extremely large and all written in assembly language. UNIX had a relatively small amount of code written in assembly language (this is called the kernel) and the remaining code for the operating system was written in a high level language called C.

Unix/Usefull_Commands

	This is the JargonFile ^(V4.00) entry for Unix - Next: Unix brain damage, Prev: uninteresting
:Unix:: /yooniks/ /n./ [In the authors words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early on it was UNICS] (also UNIX) An interactive time-sharing system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could play games on his scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is considered a co-author of the system. The turning point in Unixs history came when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972--1974, making it the first source-portable OS. Unix subsequently underwent mutations and expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely flexible and developer-friendly environment. By 1991, Unix had become the most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world. Many people consider this the most important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but see [[Unix weenie]] and [[Unix conspiracy]] for an opposing point of view). See Version 7, BSD, [[USG Unix]], Linux. Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately UNIX or Unix; both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the UNIX spelling originally happened in CACMs 1974 paper "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" because "we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps." Later, dmr tried to get the spelling changed to Unix in a couple of Bell Labs papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his words) "wimped out" on the issue. So, while the trademark today is UNIX, both capitalizations are grounded in ancient usage; the Jargon File uses Unix in deference to dmrs wishes.
* (text is auto-included via JargonExtension by mutante using jargon with VERSION 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996 - JargonFile by Eric S. Raymond is in the public domain)