History of Unix

 History of Unix

In the 1960s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric developed an experimental time sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced manyinnovations, but had many problems.

Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not the aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna,decided to redo the work on a much smaller scale. At the time, Ritchie said, "what we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication."

While Ken Thompson still had access to the Multics environment, he wrote simulations for the new file and paging system on it. He also programmed a game called Space Travel, but the game needed a more efficient and less expensive machine to run on, and eventually he found a little-used PDP-7 at Bell Labs. On this PDP-7, in 1969, a team of Bell Labs researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie, including Rudd Canaday, developed ahierarchical file system, the concepts of computer processes and device files, a command-line interpreter, and some small utility programs.

1970s

In 1970, Peter Neumann coined the project name Unics (UNiplexed Information and Computing Service) as a pun on Multics, (Multiplexed Information and Computer Services). Eventually, Unics supported multiple simultaneous users, and it was renamed Unix.

Up to that point, there had been no financial support from Bell Labs. When the Computer Science Research Group wanted to use Unix on a machine much larger than the PDP-7, Thompson and Ritchie managed to trade the promise of adding text processing capabilities to Unix, for a PDP-11/20 machine. This led to some financial support from Bell. For the first time in 1970, the Unix operating system was officially named and ran on the PDP-11/20. A text formatting program called roff and a text editor were added. All three were written in PDP-11/20 assembly language. Bell Labs used this initial text processing system, consisting of Unix, roff, and the editor, for text processing of patent applications. Roff soon evolved into troff, the first electronic publishing program with full typesetting capability. The UNIX Programmer's Manual was published on 3 November 1971.

The first commercial instance of Unix worldwide was installed in early 1972 at New York Telephone Co. Systems Development Center, under the direction of Dan Gielan. An Operational Support System was developed entirely in assembly language by Neil Groundwater that survived nearly 7 years, without change.

In 1972, Unix was rewritten in the C programming language, contrary to the general notion at the time "that something as complex as an operating system, which must deal with time-critical events, has to be written exclusively in assembly language". The migration from assembly to the higher-level language C, resulted in much more portable software, requiring only a relatively small amount of machine-dependent code to be replaced when porting Unix to other computing platforms.

USENIX 1984 Summer speakers. USENIX was founded in 1975, focusing primarily on the study and development of Unix and similar systems.

Under a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, AT&T (the parent organization of Bell Labs) had been forbidden from entering the computer business. Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product. Indeed, under the terms of the decree, Bell Labs was required to license its non-telephone technology to anyone who asked. Ken Thompson quietly began answering requests by shipping out tapes and disks, each accompanied by — according to legend — a note signed, "Love, Ken”.

AT&T made Unix available to universities and commercial firms, as well as the United States government, under licenses. The licenses included all source code including the machine-dependent parts of the kernel, which were written in PDP-11 assembly language. Copies of the annotated Unix kernel sources circulated widely in the late 1970s in the form of a much-copied book by John Lions of the University of New South Wales, the Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code, which led to considerable use of Unix as an educational example.

Versions of the Unix system were determined by editions of its user manuals. For example, "Fifth Edition UNIX" and "UNIX Version 5" have both been used to designate the same version. Development expanded, with Versions 4, 5, and 6 being released by 1975. These versions added the concept of pipes, which led to the development of a more modular code base, and quicker development cycles. Version 5, and especially Version 6, led to a plethora of different Unix versions both inside and outside Bell Labs, including PWB/UNIXand the first commercial Unix, IS/1. As more of Unix was rewritten in C, portability also increased. A group at the University of Wollongong ported Unix to the Interdata 7/32. Bell Labs developed several ports for research purposes and internal use at AT&T. Target machines included an Intel 8086-based computer (with custom-built MMU) and the UNIVAC 1100.

In May 1975, ARPA documented the benefits of the Unix time-sharing system which "presents several interesting capabilities" as an ARPA network mini-host in RFC 681.

In 1978, UNIX/32V was released for DEC's then new VAX system. By this time, over 600 machines were running Unix in some form. Version 7 Unix, the last version of Research Unix to be released widely, was released in 1979. Versions 8, 9 and 10 were developed through the 1980s but were only released to a few universities, though they did generate papers describing the new work. This research led to the development of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, a new portable distributed system.

1980s

A Unix desktop running theX Window System graphical user interface. Shown are a number of client applications common to the MIT X Consortium's distribution, including Tom's Window Manager, an X Terminal, Xbiff, xload, and the xman graphical manual page browser.

AT&T licensed UNIX System III, based largely on Version 7, for commercial use, the first version launching in 1982. This also included support for the VAX. AT&T continued to issue licenses for older Unix versions. To end the confusion between all its differing internal versions, AT&T combined them into UNIX System V Release 1. This introduced a few features such as the vi editor and curses from the Berkeley Software Distribution of Unix developed at the University of California, Berkeley. This also included support for the Western Electric 3B series of machines. AT&T provided support for System III and System V through the Unix Support Group (USG), and these systems were sometimes referred to as USG Unix.

In 1983, the U.S. Department of Justice settled its second antitrust case against AT&T and broke up the Bell System. This relieved AT&T of the 1956 consent decree that had prevented them from turning Unix into a product. AT&T promptly rushed to commercialize Unix System V, a move that nearly killed Unix. The GNU Project was founded in the same year by Richard Stallman.

Since the newer commercial UNIX licensing terms were not as favorable for academic use as the older versions of Unix, the Berkeley researchers continued to develop BSD Unix as an alternative to UNIX System III and V. Many contributions to Unix first appeared in BSD releases, notably the C shell with job control (modelled on ITS). Perhaps the most important aspect of the BSD development effort was the addition of TCP/IP network code to the mainstream Unix kernel. The BSD effort produced several significant releases that contained network code: 4.1cBSD, 4.2BSD, 4.3BSD, 4.3BSD-Tahoe ("Tahoe" being the nickname of the Computer Consoles Inc. Power 6/32 architecture that was the first non-DEC release of the BSD kernel), Net/1, 4.3BSD-Reno (to match the "Tahoe" naming, and that the release was something of a gamble), Net/2, 4.4BSD, and 4.4BSD-lite. The network code found in these releases is the ancestor of much TCP/IP network code in use today, including code that was later released in AT&T System V UNIX and early versions of Microsoft Windows. The accompanying Berkeley sockets API is a de facto standard for networking APIs and has been copied on many platforms.

Other companies began to offer commercial versions of the UNIX System for their own mini-computers and workstations. Many of these new Unix flavors were developed from the System V base under a license from AT&T; others were based on BSD. One of the leading developers of BSD, Bill Joy, went on to co-found Sun Microsystems in 1982 and created SunOS for their workstation computers. In 1980, Microsoft announced its first Unix for 16-bit microcomputers called Xenix, which the Santa Cruz Operation(SCO) ported to the Intel 8086 processor in 1983, and eventually branched Xenix into SCO UNIX in 1989.

During this period (before PC compatible computers with MS-DOS became dominant), industry observers expected that UNIX, with its portability and rich capabilities, was likely to become the industry standard operating system for microcomputers. In 1984, several companies established the X/Open consortium with the goal of creating an open system specification based on UNIX. Despite early progress, the standardization effort collapsed into the "Unix wars", with various companies forming rival standardization groups. The most successful Unix-related standard turned out to be the IEEE's POSIX specification, designed as a compromise API readily implemented on both BSD and System V platforms, published in 1988 and soon mandated by the United States government for many of its own systems.

AT&T added various features into UNIX System V, such as file locking, system administration, STREAMS, new forms of IPC, the Remote File System and TLI. AT&T cooperated with Sun Microsystems and between 1987 and 1989, merged features from Xenix, BSD, SunOS, and System V into System V Release 4 (SVR4), independently of X/Open. This new release consolidated all the previous features into one package, and heralded the end of competing versions. It also increased licensing fees.

During this time a number of vendors including Digital Equipment, Sun, Addamax and others began building trusted versions of UNIX for high security applications, mostly designed for military and law enforcement applications.

1990s

In 1990, the Open Software Foundation released OSF/1, their standard Unix implementation, based on Mach and BSD. The Foundation was started in 1988 and was funded by several Unix-related companies that wished to counteract the collaboration of AT&T and Sun on SVR4. Subsequently, AT&T and another group of licensees formed the group UNIX International in order to counteract OSF. This escalation of conflict between competing vendors again gave rise to the phrase Unix wars.

In 1991, a group of BSD developers (Donn Seeley, Mike Karels, Bill Jolitz, and Trent Hein) left the University of California to found Berkeley Software Design, Inc (BSDI). BSDI produced a fully functional commercial version of BSD Unix for the inexpensive and ubiquitous Intel platform, which started a wave of interest in the use of inexpensive hardware for production computing. Shortly after it was founded, Bill Jolitz left BSDI to pursue distribution of 386BSD, the free software ancestor of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds began work on Linux, a Unix-Like system which he based on MINIX that initially ran on IBM PC compatible computers.

By 1993, most commercial vendors had changed their variants of Unix to be based on System V with many BSD features added. The creation of the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative that year, by the major players in Unix, marked the end of the most notorious phase of the Unix wars, and was followed by the merger of UI and OSF in 1994. The new combined entity retained the OSF name and stopped work on OSF/1. By that time the only vendor using it was Digital Equipment Corporation, which continued its own development, rebranding their product Digital UNIX in early 1995.

Shortly after UNIX System V Release 4 was produced, AT&T sold all its rights to UNIX to Novell. Dennis Ritchie likened this sale to the Biblical story of Esau selling his birthright for the mess of pottage. Novell developed its own version, UnixWare, merging its NetWare with UNIX System V Release 4. Novell tried to use this as a marketing tool against Windows NT, but their core markets suffered considerably.

In 1993, Novell decided to transfer the UNIX trademark and certification rights to the X/Open Consortium. In 1996, X/Open merged with OSF, creating the Open Group. Various standards by the Open Group now define what is and what is not a UNIX operating system, notably the post-1998 Single UNIX Specification.

In 1995, the business of administering and supporting the existing UNIX licenses, plus rights to further develop the System V code base, were sold by Novell to the Santa Cruz Operation. Whether Novell also sold the copyrights is currently the subject of litigation (see below).

In 1997, Apple Computer sought a new foundation for its Macintosh operating system and chose NEXTSTEP, an operating system developed by NeXT. The core operating system, which was based on BSD and the Mach kernel, was renamed Darwin after Apple acquired it. The deployment of Darwin in Mac OS X makes it, according to a statement made by an Apple employee at a USENIX conference, the most widely used Unix-based system in the desktop computer market.

2000s

In 2000, SCO sold its entire UNIX business and assets to Caldera Systems, which later changed its name to The SCO Group.

The bursting of the dot-com bubble (2001–2003) led to significant consolidation of versions of Unix. Of the many commercial variants of Unix that were born in the 1980s, only Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX were still doing relatively well in the market, though SGI's IRIX persisted for quite some time. Of these, Solaris had the largest market share in 2005.

In 2003, the SCO Group started legal action against various users and vendors of Linux. SCO had alleged that Linux contained copyrighted Unix code now owned by the SCO Group. Other allegations included trade-secret violations by IBM, or contract violations by former Santa Cruz customers who had since converted to Linux. However, Novell disputed the SCO Group's claim to hold copyright on the UNIX source base. According to Novell, SCO (and hence the SCO Group) are effectively franchise operators for Novell, which also retained the core copyrights, veto rights over future licensing activities of SCO, and 95% of the licensing revenue. The SCO Group disagreed with this, and the dispute resulted in the SCO v. Novell lawsuit. On 10 August 2007, a major portion of the case was decided in Novell's favor (that Novell had the copyright to UNIX, and that the SCO Group had improperly kept money that was due to Novell). The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent". After the ruling, Novell announced they have no interest in suing people over Unix and stated, "We don't believe there is Unix in Linux". SCO successfully got the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to partially overturn this decision on 24 August 2009 which sent the lawsuit back to the courts for a jury trial.

On 30 March 2010, following a jury trial, Novell, and not The SCO Group, was "unanimously " to be the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights. The SCO Group, through bankruptcy trustee Edward Cahn, decided to continue the lawsuit against IBM for causing a decline in SCO revenues.

In 2005, Sun Microsystems released the bulk of its Solaris system code (based on UNIX System V Release 4) into an open source project called OpenSolaris. New Sun OS technologies, notably the ZFS file system, were first released as open source code via the OpenSolaris project. Soon afterwards, OpenSolaris spawned several non-Sun distributions. In 2010, after Oracle acquired Sun, OpenSolaris was officially discontinued, but the development of derivatives continued.