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During March 1969 the Bell laboratories stop the development of Multics (multiplexed Information and Computing Service). Some of developments from Multics will be seen later on in Unix.
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Ken Thompson while working at Bell Labs writes the first version of an as-yet-unnamed operating system. He used assembly language for a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer.
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ken Thompson's operating gets the name of Unics for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service. The name would eventually get changed to Unix.
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1st edition of the "Unix Programmer's Manual," written by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
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Unix moves to the new Digital Equipment Coprs. PDP11 minicomputer
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Dennis Ritchie develops the C programming language
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The "Pipe" mechanism in Unix for sharing information between two programs, which will influence OS for decades is added to Unix. Unix is rewritten for assembler into C
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University of California at Berkeley receives a copy of Unix.
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Unix appears in a monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The authors call it "a general-purpose, multi-user, interactive operating system." The article generates demand for Unix.
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Bell Labs programmer Mike Lesk develops UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy Program) for netwrk transfer of files, e-mail and Usenet content.
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Unix is ported to non-DEC hardware: Interdata 8/32 and IBM 360.
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Bill Joy, a graduate student at Berkeley, sends out copies of the first Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD). BSD becomes a rival Unix branch at AT&T's Unix. Its variants and eventual descendaents include FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DEC Ultrix, SunOS, NeXTstep/OpenStep and Mac OS X.
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4BSD with DARPA sponsorship, becomes the first version of Unix to incorporate TCP/IP
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Bill Joy co-founds Sun Microsystems to produce the Unix-based Sun Workstation
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AT&T releases the first version of the influential Unix System V, which will become the basis for IBM's AIX and Hewlett Packard's HP-UX.
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AT&T describes its support policy for Unix: "No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance."
X/Open Co., A European consortium of computer makers, is formed to standardize Unix in the X/Open portability guide. -
AT&T publishes the System V Interface Definition (SVID), an attempt to set a standard for how Unix works.
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Rich Rashid and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University create the first version of Mach, a replacement kernel for BSD Unix intended to create an operating system with good portability, strong security and use multiprocessor application
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AT&T Bell Labs and Sun Microsystems announce plans to co-develop a system that would unify the two major Unix branches. Andrew Tanenbaum writes Minix, an open-source Unix clone for use in computer science classrooms.
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The "Unix Wars" are underway. In response to the AT&T/Sun partnership, rival Unix vendors including DEC, HP and IBM form the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to develop open Unix standards. AT&T and its partners then form their own standards group, Unix international.
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Sun Microsystems announces Solaris, an operating system based on SVR4. Linux Torvalds writes Linux, an open-source OS kernel inspired by Minix.
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The Linux kernel is combined with GNU to create the free GNU/Linux operating system, which many refer to as simply "Linux"
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NASA invents Beowulf computing based on inexpensive clusters of commodity PC's running Unix or Linux on a TCP/IP LAN.
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X/Open mergers with Open Software Foundation to form The Open Group.
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U.S President Clinton presents the national Medal of Technology to Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for their work at Bell Labs.