History of Unix starts from the development of MULTICS(Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developed this experimental operating system in the early 1960s.
Multics was very complex & big in code and hence the developers planned to write their own OS with minimal code which evolved an idea of UNICS.
UNICS or later called as UNIX is one of the first operating systems written in high level language C. The first version of UNIX Operating System (OS) was developed in
1969 by Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, engineers at AT&T Bell Laboratories in assembly language which was installed on Programmed Data Processor -7(PDP-7) hardware.
PDP-7 is a small computer produced by Digital Equipment Corporation, an American company, as a part of their PDP series computer hardware(s). This OS has no official
name, however the developer team used to call it as UNICS(Uniplexed information and computing service) since its not as much multi-tasking as MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) which later on became UNIX. UNICS is based on time sharing operating system and also named as Time Sharing System.
2. Evolution of Unix
UNICS Evolution History
3. Evolution of Sun OS
SUN OS Evolution History
Evolution of Solaris from Sun OS
Solaris Evolution History
4. Evolution of Free Linux Tools: GCC Compiler, etc(or FSF: Free Software Foundation)
In 1984, Free Software foundation is evolved by Richard Stallman to create free version of Unix Operating system. And they begun this as a GNU project and evolved many useful components like GCC(GNU C Compiler), emacs text editor, and a lot of other tools.
However they are still missing the main part of this free GNU operating system i.e. a free kernel.
5. Evolution of Linux OS and Kernel
In 1991, Linus Torvalds played the major role in this free software revolution by providing a free kernel which can be combined with the various tools FSF created.
This free kernel is released after his name as “Linux Kernel” and many of them started referring it as “GNU/Linux”.
