Version 2.2
By Wong Kin
The first UNIX was created by Ken Thompson in 1969 at AT&T's Bell Laboratories (Bell Labs). This primitive operating system was firstly implemented on a DEC PDP-7 machine with a teletype (i.e., the tty) and a then good graphic display, was able to run a simulation game called `Space Travel', also developed by Thompson. This gave people faith that it was an usable system.
UNIX was initially tied up to DEC PDP machines until Brian Kernighan joined the development team by introducing the first C complier. In 1973, the UNIX kernel was re-written in C. This tack, allowing UNIX to port from one type of processor to another by simply recompiling its C source code, contributed greatly to its later popularity.
The cryptic name `UNIX' could be a misnomer to most people. Is it jocular? Dubious. But Brian Kernighan, who coined the name, certainly thought so. Before that, it was originally called `UNICS' which stands for Uniplexed Information and Computing System, a two-user system.
At its infant stage, UNIX was not made commercial by AT&T due to the US Anti-Trust laws. Despite that, the source code of UNIX (Fifth Edition) was freely available to some colleges and universities for educational purposes which galvanized many enhancement projects on UNIX. The system has since then prevailed the academic communities and later the industry.
In another development, with the help of Ken Thompson et al, two graduate students, Bill Joy and Chuck Haley, at the University of California at Berkeley built a new UNIX distribution by putting together AT&T's Sixth Edition UNIX and sundries of other software pieces. They called it Berkeley Software Distribution which was more well-known in its acronym BSD. In 1979, AT&T released the Seventh Edition of UNIX which included a K&R C complier and Bourne Shell (sh).
Meanwhile, some companies were porting UNIX for commercial use. An example of these was XENIX, jointly developed by the Microsoft Corporation and the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). By the mid-'80s, with the success of Sun Microsystems' UNIX workstations, companies like HP, DEC, IBM and SGI, one after another, jumped on the UNIX bandwagon by developing a slightly different variant each. The UNIX realm was expanding rapidly. The kind of glowing demand eventually propelled AT&T to be resolute in that they should also produce a commercial version of UNIX. The first commercial release was unveiled in 1982, known as System III. Prior to System III, UNIX was only used at Bell Laboratories internally.
While AT&T started marketing its own UNIX, it allowed other companies to license it and sell it as a product. This amusing dilemma meant that AT&T was competing with its licensees in the same market.
In view of this, the Open Software Foundation (OSF) was formed by a group of UNIX vendors and organizations, including IBM, DEC and HP in the late 80's. Their result effort was OSF/1 - a non-AT&T dependent UNIX-like operating system.
In response, AT&T decided to sell its UNIX software company, UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. (USL), to a third party so as to form an independent company. In June 1993, Novell, Inc. (the maker of NetWare and UnixWare) bought USL and the trademark of UNIX.
As of December 1995, Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) acquired the UNIX business from Novell. The SVR4 source code is therefore the property of Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), Inc. and is distributed by SCO, Inc. through licensing. For this reason, publishing the source code or any part of it is illegal.