2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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Unix
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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/yooniks/ , n. [In the authors' words, A weak pun on Multics ; very early on
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it was UNICS ] (also UNIX ) An interactive timesharing system invented in
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1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so
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he could play games on his scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of
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C, is considered a co-author of the system. The turning point in Unix's
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history came when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972
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1974, making it the first source-portable OS. Unix subsequently underwent
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mutations and expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in
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a uniquely flexible and developer-friendly environment. By 1991, Unix had
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become the most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in
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the world and since 1996 the variant called Linux has been at the cutting
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edge of the open source movement. Many people consider the success of Unix
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the most important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but
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see Unix weenie and Unix conspiracy for an opposing point of view). See
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Version 7 , BSD , Linux. Archetypal hackers ken (left) and dmr (right). Some
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people are confused over whether this word is appropriately UNIX or Unix ;
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both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that
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the UNIX spelling originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper The UNIX
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Time-Sharing System because we had a new typesetter and troff had just been
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invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps. Later,
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dmr tried to get the spelling changed to Unix in a couple of Bell Labs
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papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and
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eventually (his words) wimped out on the issue. So, while the trademark
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today is UNIX , both capitalizations are grounded in ancient usage; the
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Jargon File uses Unix in deference to dmr's wishes.
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