It was in the 60s when Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson started collaborating at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs. The pair was developing — a time-sharing operating system, which was to be constructed on the concept of a single-level memory — Multics. Retro-computers were in use, they were bulky and inefficient, rooms full of machinery were dedicated to performing a single task. It took the sagacity two geniuses with compatible skill-sets to conceive the forerunner to our present-day operating system. Although Multics was an ambitious project, both — Ritchie and Thompson were embittered by its magnitude and complexity. The team of researchers introduced a hierarchical system to manage the files. They employed a command-line interpreter along with compact utility programs, which were parallel to elements of Multics, although less complex.
Thus, Unix was born out of adversity. It was christened ‘Unics’ in 1970 and stands for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service. The word was a pun on the name ‘Multics’ Multics, [Multiplexed Information and Computer Services] and is pronounced “eunuchs.”
The first distinguished language to run on Unix was developed by Douglas McIlroy, which was later used by Thompson to develop the fundamentals of B programming language. Eventually, Thompson and Ritchie armed Unix with the ability to process text, adding the first text-formatting…
