24.2. Evolution of UNIX
UNIX dates from 1969. Bell Telephone's Research Laboratory had been involved in the Multics research group in collaboration with MIT and General Electric. The aim was to build a large, complex, general-purpose time-sharing system. Bell pulled out of the collaboration in the late 1960s and Ken Thompson, soon joined by Dennis Ritchie, set about building a smaller computing environment which became UNIX.
UNIX was soon moved to the PDP-11 architecture and was implemented in the high-level language C in 1973. This was unusual at the time and made it possible to port UNIX relatively easily to other architectures. UNIX therefore had the advantage of being independent of any computer manufacturer and potentially available on any ...
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