Niels Horn's Blog
Random thoughts, tips & tricks about Slackware-Linux, Lego and Star WarsArchive for the 'BSD' Category
Slackware/Linux/Unix (pre-)history (Part 3: Unix-wars, and peace)
October 20th, 2008 by Niels Horn in BSD, UNIX, history | No Comments »
The big split
The first versions of Bell Labs' Unix. also known as 'Research Unix', included the full source code, allowing universities to improve and extend the operating system. As I wrote in the previous post in this series, UCB did a lot to add to Unix and created its own distribution - BSD.The first version [...]
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 [...]