History of the UNIX operating system

The first version of UNIX was created in 1969 by Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, system engineers at AT&T's Bell Labs. It went through many revisions and gained in popularity until 1977, when it was first made commercially available by Interactive Systems Corporation.

At the same time a team from the University of California at Berkeley was working to improve UNIX. In 1977 it released the first Berkeley Software Distribution, which became known as BSD. Over time this won favour through innovations such as the C shell.

Meanwhile the AT&T version was developing in different ways. The 1978 release of Version 7 included the Bourne Shell for the first time. By 1983 commercial interest was growing and Sun Microsystems produced a UNIX workstation. System V appeared, directly descended from the original AT&T UNIX and the prototype of the more widely used variant today.

• Modern variants of UNIX

This site maintained by unixhelp@mathcs.duq.edu