History of Unix

In this article you will learn about brief history of Unix operating system. Unix is a really old operating system that has underwent many changes along the way…

• In 1969, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others began working on Uniplexed Information and Computing System (UNICS). The name UNICS was then shortened to Unix.

• In 1971, the first edition of Unix appeared along with the B compiler. It consisted of more than 60 commands including cat, chdir, chmod, chown, and cp.

• In 1972, the second edition of Unix was released.

• In 1973, the third edition of Unix appeared along with the Unix C compiler (cc). The kernel was still written in assembly language.

• In 1973, the fourth edition of Unix was released. The kernel was rewritten in the C compiler.

• In 1974, the fifth edition of Unix was released. The source code was made freely available to universities for educational purposes. In 1974, Thompson taught Unix for a year at the University of California, Berkeley. When Thompson returned to Bell Labs, students and professors at Berkeley continued to enhance Unix. This led to the formation of the Berkeley Software Distribution, which was commonly known as BSD.

• In 1975, the sixth edition of Unix was released. This edition, also known as V6 Unix, was the first edition that was available outside Bell Labs.

• In 1977, 1BSD, the first edition, was released; in 1978, 2BSD, the second edition, was released.

• In 1979, the seventh edition of Unix was released. This edition was released along with Steve Bourne’s shell (sh). At this point, the Unix systems group (USG) was created, and it was focused on enhancing the seventh edition.

• The development of Unix split into two main branches: System 5 (SYSV) and Berkeley software distribution (BSD). BSD was developed by students and professors at the University of California, Berkeley. SYSV was developed by AT&T and other commercial companies.

• In 1979, 3BSD, the third edition, was released.

• In 1980, 4.0BSD, the fourth version of the BSD Unix variant, was released.

• In 1982, AT&T transferred its Unix development to Western Electric, which developed the System III version of Unix.

• In 1983, Western Electric released System V, whereas System IV was reserved for only AT&T’s use.

• In 1984, the USG group, which was renamed the UNIX system development laboratory (USDL) group, released System V Release 2 (SVR2), which was the first version of Unix that supported paging, shared memory, and other associated features.

• In 1985, the eighth edition of Unix was released on the basis of the 4.1BSD version.

• In 1987, the USDL group, which was renamed AT&T Information Systems (ATTIS) group, released System V Release 3 (SVR3).

• In 1988, the ninth version of Unix was developed, and it was based on the 4.3BSD version.

• In 1989, the tenth version of Unix was developed.

For more information on history of Unix, visit Wikipedia.

Suryateja Pericherla

Suryateja Pericherla, at present is a Research Scholar (full-time Ph.D.) in the Dept. of Computer Science & Systems Engineering at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. Previously worked as an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSE at Vishnu Institute of Technology, India.

He has 11+ years of teaching experience and is an individual researcher whose research interests are Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Computer Security, Network Security and Blockchain.

He is a member of professional societies like IEEE, ACM, CSI and ISCA. He published several research papers which are indexed by SCIE, WoS, Scopus, Springer and others.