The History of Unix

Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie at PDP-11 (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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…