After four decades, the future of the operating system is clouded, but its legacy will endure.
June 4, 2009 (Computerworld) Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created.
In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer at AT&T subsidiary Bell Laboratories, saw the month-long departure of his wife and young son as an opportunity to put his ideas for a new operating system into practice. He wrote the first version of Unix in assembly language for a wimpy Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) PDP-7 minicomputer, spending one week each on the operating system, a shell, an editor and an assembler.
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