from the October 1994 issue of Byte magazine by PETER H. SALUS New Jersey, in the muggy summer of 1969, was the birthplace of Unix. It was born out of the frustration that resulted when AT&T’s BTL (Bell Telephone Labs) withdrew from the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) project, a joint attempt by BTL, General Electric, and MIT to create an operating system for a large computer accommodating up to a thousand simultaneous users.

An interview with Bob Marsh from the December 1984 issue of Unix Review magazine Many factors have contributed to the birth of a personal UNIX market but none has been more important than Onyx System’s decision to introduce a UNIX-based micro in 1980. Bob Marsh, now chairman of Plexus Computers, made that decision. Chances are another company would have done the job sooner or later. But Marsh’s timing was critical. The success of the Onyx product showed not only that a UNIX micro port was technically feasible but commercially viable.

from the July 1985 issue of Unix World magazine by David Spencer Current third-generation languages such as C and FORTRAN will have to move aside at some point for a new family of fourth-generation languages. At 30 years old, FORTRAN is graying at the temples; third-generation programming languages are in their heyday. So you are probably wondering how we will speak to computers during the next decade. If current projections hold true, computers will seem (and talk) more like us fairly soon.

by Otis Wilson from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine Thanks to the developers of the UNIX operating system, and to the research method at AT&T Bell Laboratories, the technical evolution of the UNIX System has been well documented and its history largely understood. From a technical perspective, there just isn’t much argument about who did what when and why things were done the way they were. On the other hand, the “business” history of the UNIX system is largely an oral one, rich in folklore and popularized by the modem press in hopes of finding some explanation for the phenomenon that is the UNIX system.

Notes from the underground by Doug Merritt with Ken Arnold and Bob Toxen from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine It was 2 am and I was lying face down on the floor in Cory Hall, the EECS building on the UC Berkeley campus, waiting for Bob to finish installing our bootleg copy of the UNIX kernel. If successful, new and improved terminal drivers we had written would soon be up and running.

By August Mohr from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine This is, so to speak, a history of how UNIX evolved as a product; not the “official” history of who was responsible for what features, and what year which milestones were crossed, but the “political” history of how decision were made and what motivated the people involved. Most of the readers of this mazagine are familiar with the system itself, so I don’t want to go into great detail about how the system got to be what it is internally, but rather how it how it got to be at all.

by Marshall Kirk McKusick from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie presented the first UNIX paper at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Purdue University in November, 1973. Professor Bob Fabry was in attendance and immediately became interested in obtaining a copy of the system to experiment with at Berkeley. At the time, Berkeley had only large mainframe computer systems doing batch processing, so the first order of business was to get a PDP-11/45 suitable for running the then current Version 4 of UNIX.

A Good Buy on UNIX Special Report by Dean Hannotte from the June 12, 1984 issue of PC Magazine The Mark Williams Company’s COHERENT operating system is a rewritten version of the seventh edition of UNIX, with some extensions and enhancements. Regrettably, it has incoherencies. The Mark Williams Company’s COHERENT operating system is a State-of-the-art microcomputer implementation of AT&T’s UNIX, without the state-of-the-art AT&T licensing fees. It is a completely rewritten version of the seventh edition of UNIX and includes some of its multi-user and multitasking abilities.