Niels Horn's Blog
Random thoughts, tips & tricks about Slackware-Linux, Lego and Star WarsArchive for the 'Bell Labs' Category
Slackware/Linux/Unix (pre-)history (Part 2: A new language, a philosophy, and the spreading of Unix)
October 20th, 2008 by Niels Horn in BSD, Bell Labs, UNIX, history | 1 Comment »
Needing a new language
The first crude version of Unix was written in assembler language on the PDP-7 and later the PDP-11. But Ken Thompson thought it should be written in a higher-level language. In 1971 he first experimented with Fortran, but according to some stories, he gave up after only one day. He then [...]
Slackware/Linux/Unix (pre-)history (Part 1: The origins)
October 16th, 2008 by Niels Horn in Bell Labs, MIT, UNIX, history | No Comments »
In the beginning there was…
CTSS, the Compatible Time-Sharing System, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computation Center and first demonstrated in 1961. It had some interesting features like:
inter-user messaging (what we would call 'e-mail' nowadays)
a program called RUNCOM, that could execute several commands put together in a file - like modern-day shell scripts
RUNOFF, [...]