A Brief History of FreeBSD and UNIX

The original UNIX operating system was developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Two AT&T engineers—Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—were the main driving forces behind the UNIX project.

The origins of UNIX can probably be traced to the spring of 1969. It was an offshoot of a largely unsuccessful effort by a conglomeration of companies to develop a “time-sharing” operating system, one in which a mainframe system’s limited computing resources could be shared among many different users logged in simultaneously from remote terminals. The operating system that this consortium developed was called MULTICS; although it introduced many innovative features and created the template for what we think of today as a multiuser ...

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