Where Did UNIX Come From and Why Are There Differe Essay Example For Students

Where Did UNIX Come From and Why Are There Differe Essay nt Versions Of UNIX?The first efforts at developing a multi-user, multi-tasking operating systemwere begun in the 1960s in a development project called MULTICS. While workingfor Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1969 and 1970, Ken Thompson and DennisRitchie began to develop their own single-user, multi-tasking small operatingsystem and they chose the name UNIX. Their initial goal was simply to operatetheir DEC PDP machines more effectively. In 1971, UNIX became multi-user andmulti-tasking, but it was still just being developed by a small group ofprogrammers who were trying to take advantage of the machines they had at hand. (In other words, this operating system that they were developing did not run onany machine made by Bell!)In 1973, Dennis Ritchie rewrote the UNIX operating system in C (a language hehad developed.) And in 1975, the portability of the C programming language wasused to port UNIX to a wide variety of hardware platforms. For legal reasons,Bell Labs was not able to market UNIX in the 1970s, though they did share thisoperating system with many universities most notably UC-Berkeley. This led tosome of the variations in UNIX which we see today. After the divestiture of theBell System, their parent company, ATT, became much more interested inmarketing a commercial version of UNIX. And today we see that many companieshave now licensed their own version:ATTs System V,Versions of System V such as SCOs Xenix and IBMs AIXBerkeleys UNIX (called BSD for Berkeley System Development),Versions of Berkeley UNIX such as Sun Microsystems SunOS, DECs Ultrix andCarnegie Mellon Universitys Mach(used on the NEXT). Category: Technology