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Building a Legacy

UNIX, AIX improve significantly in 25 years

The past two years have been major events in the world of UNIX. In 2009 UNIX celebrated 40 years, and last month was the 25th birthday for AIX. In this article, I’ll take a brief walk through time and look at the progression UNIX and AIX have taken.

Establishing UNIX

In my mind, 1969 is famous for three events: the moon landing, Woodstock and the birth of UNIX. In August of that year, Ken Thompson created the first flavor of UNIX for the PDP-7; it took him a month to build the operating system and environment. In 1971, text formatting and editing were added and UNIX got ported to the PDP-11. Then, in 1972, Dennis Ritchie created the initial C language, which was based on Thompson’s B language. Thompson then rewrote UNIX in C and renamed it to UNICS (Uniplexed Information and Computing Service). I remember studying a textbook in the late 1970s that Brian Kernighan and Ritchie authored. Little did I know how cutting edge it was. Douglas McIlroy added the pipe feature in 1973–a feature that has become critical to anyone who does any kind of scripting.

In 1978 Bill Joy from Berkeley created the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) version of UNIX and then in 1980 version 7 included licenses that prohibited universities from using the source for study. In 1982, Bill Joy formed SUN Microsystems and created a version of BSD called SunOS, the precursor to Solaris. In 1983, AT&T released the first version of UNIX System V, which was the foundation for AIX and HP-UX. Thompson and Ritchie also won the A.M. Turing Award for their UNIX work. A citation from that award states, “The genius of the UNIX system is its framework, which enables programmers to stand on the work of others.”

In 1987 Andrew Tanenbaum wrote MINIX operating system for the 80286 and in 1991 Linus Torvalds created the first version of Linux. In 1993, the release of Windows NT spurred creation of standards groups. The Open Group was formed and owns the Single UNIX Specification.

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