Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics, but not by its goals, individual researchers at Bell Labs started withdrawing from the project. The last to leave were Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna,[15] who decided to reimplement their experiences in a new project of smaller scale. This new operating system was initially without organizational backing, and also without a name.
The new operating system was a single-tasking system.[15] In 1970, the group coined the name Unics for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service (pronounced "eunuchs"), as a pun on Multics, which stood for Multiplexed Information and Computer Services. Brian Kernighan takes credit for the idea, but adds that "no one can remember" the origin of the final spelling Unix.[16] Dennis Ritchie,[15] Doug McIlroy,[1] and Peter G. Neumann[17] also credit Kernighan.
The operating system was originally written in assembly language, but in 1972, the code was migrated to the C programming language.[18] This new language which was still in development to address shortcomings, such as byte addressability, of its predecessor, the B programming language, would become historically tied to the progress in development of Unix. As a high-level programming language it greatly improved portability of the Unix software, requiring only a relatively small amount of machine-dependent code to be replaced when porting to other computing platforms.[19]
Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are collectively referred to as "Research Unix". In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to Donald B. Gillies at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science.[20] UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson, who had worked on the UNIX kernel at Bell Labs, was instrumental in negotiating the terms of the license.[21]
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Anonymous2018-06-11 13:01
>>4 Unix is more the equivalent to removing your brain and replacing it with a turd.