The Earliest Unix Code: An Anniversary Source Code Release
What is it that runs the servers that hold our online world, be it the web or the cloud? What enables the mobile apps that are at the center of increasingly on-demand lives in the developed world and of mobile banking and messaging in the developing world? The answer is the operating system Unix and its many descendants: Linux, Android, BSD Unix, MacOS, iOS—the list goes on and on. Want to glimpse the Unix in your Mac? Open a Terminal window and enter “man roff” to view the Unix manual entry for an early text formatting program that lives within your operating system.
2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Unix. In the summer of 1969, that same summer that saw humankind’s first steps on the surface of the Moon, computer scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories—most centrally Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—began the construction of a new operating system, using a then-aging DEC PDP-7 computer at the labs. As Ritchie would later explain:
“What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied from remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.”1
