The UNIX Operating System
From Bell Labs, by Ken Thompson and others at 1127.
This OS needs no introduction.
When I first encountered Unix 6th edition after working in the IBM mainframe world, my reaction was “Amazing! the whole Unix kernel has fewer lines of code than the OS/360 serial line driver.” – Richard Miller
Misc Documents
- McIlroy’s pipes - The (physical piece of) paper where Doug McIlroy describes his idea for “garden hose–screw” program coupling.
- Unix for Poets - A collection of exercises and examples to illustrate the way one can use Unix tools. By Kenneth Ward Church.
- A couple of emails on the origins and design of the find(1) command.
- An Oral History of Unix - Interviews with early UNIX contributors.
- Unix quiz - This quiz by Rob Pike was inspired by the mechanism employed to exit Research UNIX’s mpx GUI.
Papers and Presentations
- Program Design in the UNIX Environment (also known as “cat -v considered harmful”) - by Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan.
- A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986 - by Doug McIlroy.
- A History of UNIX before Berkeley: UNIX Evolution: 1975-1984 - by Ian F. Darwin, Ian Darwin and Geoffrey Collyer.
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy - Slides from a talk Rob Pike gave at the uptime(1) conference in Denmark.
- Reflections on Window Systems: A Personal History of Software Engineering - A presentation given at DGPis40. ( mp4 and slides )
Manual Pages
- Research Unix 8th Edition Manual Pages.
- Unix Writer’s Work Bench Manual Pages.
- Unix First Edition Manual Pages.
See Also
Links
- Articles about the Unix History at 9grid.fr - In French.