2. History

• long history: over 25 years old (On the Early History and Impact of Unix, Ronda Hauben).
• 1969 at Bell Laboratories (pun on «Multics») -- K. Thompson / B. Kernighan
• C language around 1974 (B. Kernighan / D.Richie)
• Ported to several platforms in C («Portable OS»)
• dsitributed to laboratories / Universities for small fee ($150)
• 1978: V7 is the first commercial version
• two main «branches»: BSD (4.4BSD) and SVSTEM V (SVR4), and now Linux
• most ported operating system -- free versions available

Today: over 50 variants (see UGU). Most known:

• Solaris -- Sun Microsystems
• HP-UX -- Hewlett Packard
• AIX -- IBM
• Irix -- Silicon Graphics, Inc.
• MacOS X / Darwin -- Apple
• GNU/Linux -- various (Debian, RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, Mandrake, Turbolinux)
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD