www.multicians.org/unix.html
Bibliography | 10 Sites | 11 Chronology 12 Stories | 13 Glossary | 14 Papers | 15 Humor | 16 Documents | 17 Source | 18 Links | 19 Site Map | 20 About Tom Van Vleck The history of Unix is covered in several books. I am going to stick to my first-hand knowledge in this note. When Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) joined with MIT 21 Project MAC and General Electric's computer department to create the Multics project, BTL contributed some of the finest programmers in the world to the team. I first met 22 Ken Thompson because he had written a slick editor for 23 CTSS called 24 QED. It was descended from QED on the SDS-940, but was quite different because Ken had added regular expressions to it, and made many other changes. Although Bell Labs had dropped out of the Multics project in April 1969, those of us in Cambridge kept in touch with individual folks at BTL, and so we knew that Ken and Dennis were working on a project of their own. We even knew that it had a joke name, Unix, coined by Brian Kernighan, that was a reference to Multics. The second of these conferences was held in Elmsford, NY in 1973, and Ken and Dennis gave a talk there, presenting Unix. Several of us Multicians went to the conference, and sat with the Bell Labs ex-Multicians and applauded the paper, which was and remains one of the best and clearest pieces of writing in the computer field. There were some other great papers at that conference, but as I remember, the Unix paper won the best paper award. I was working for MIT in those days, and one thing I did was to organize an MIT PDP-11 users' group and encourage them to look into Unix. The idea of a free, non-vendor-supported operating system was new to them. We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. There were little earphones for simultaneous translation at every seat. John Shoch from Xerox PARC spoke before me, and talked about some of the neat things they were doing at Xerox with Unix systems. After I gave my speech, there were questions from the audience. Someone asked a question, which was translated to me as, roughly, "You say that Multics has only 25 sites. Afterward the local Multicians told me my questioner was one of an anti-Multics faction in 37 Bull. It occurs to me now that he was probably more likely pro-Unix than anti-Multics, but in those days there was a lot of fear and with-us-or-against-us thinking, and Multics was 38 fighting for its life as usual. When I finally got a chance to use Unix in 1987, on an Apollo workstation at Tandem, I felt instantly at home. The first time I remember the name "shell" for this function was in a Multics design document by 40 Doug Eastwood (of BTL). Commands that return a value into the command line were called "evaluated commands" in the original Multics shell, which used square brackets where Unix uses backticks. The Unix roff, troff, and nroff commands are direct descendants of 41 Jerry Saltzer's CTSS RUNOFF command, used for Multics documentation. Bob Morris and Doug McIlroy ported that program from MAD to BCPL and then got the BCPL runoff up on Multics when the 42 IBM 7094 was going away; There was some influence in the other direction in the 70s and 80s. For example, Multics " 43 master directories" work very much like Unix mount points. For more information, see * Dennis Ritchie's 44 "The evolution of the UNIX time-sharing system," Bell System Technical Journal 63, 8, Oct 1984.
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