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. The Computer Science Department, together with the Mathematics Department and the Statistics Department were able to jointly purchase a PDP-11/45. In January, 1974, a Version 4 tape was delivered and UNIX was installed by graduate student Keith Standiford.

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.

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. The object lesson was not lost on OEMs , who were casting about at the time for alternatives to expensive minicomputer systems.

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.

by Bill Tuthill

from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine

C is descended from B, which was descended from BCPL. BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) was developed in 1967 by Martin Richards. B was an interpretive language written in 1970 by Ken Thompson (1) after he abandoned a Fortran implementation for the PDP-7.

BCPL and B were typeless languages, which may account for the type permissiveness of C. They restricted their scope to machine words and were rather low level. However, they provided structured programming constructs similar to those in Algol. BCPL, B, and C all provide pointers and address arithmetic. All three pass function parameters by value, rather than by address, but permit passing by address if desired.

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.