The first UNIX implementation was developed in 1969 (the same year that Linus
Torvalds was born) by Ken Thompson at Bell Laboratories, a division of the tele-
phone corporation, AT&T. It was written in assembler for a Digital PDP-7 mini-
computer. The name UNIX was a pun on MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and
Computing Service), the name of an earlier operating system project in which AT&T
collaborated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and General Elec-
tric. (AT&T had by this time withdrawn from the project in frustration at its initial
failure to develop an economically useful system.) Thompson drew several ideas
for his new operating system from MULTICS, including a tree-structured file sys-
tem, a separate program for interpreting commands (the shell), and the notion of
files as unstructured streams of bytes.
In 1970, UNIX was rewritten in assembly language for a newly acquired Digital
PDP-11 minicomputer, then a new and powerful machine. Vestiges of this PDP-11
heritage can be found in various names still used on most UNIX implementations,
including Linux.
A short time later, Dennis Ritchie, one of Thompson’s colleagues at Bell Labo-
ratories and an early collaborator on UNIX, designed and implemented the C pro-
gramming language. This was an evolutionary process; C followed an earlier
interpreted language, B. B was initially implemented by Thompson and drew many
of its ideas from a still earlier programming language named BCPL. By 1973, C had
matured to a point where the UNIX kernel could be almost entirely rewritten in
the new language. UNIX thus became one of the earliest operating systems to be
written in a high-level language, a fact that made subsequent porting to other hard-
ware architectures possible.
The genesis of C explains why it, and its descendant C++, have come to be used
so widely as system programming languages today. Previous widely used languages
were designed with other purposes in mind: FORTRAN for mathematical tasks
performed by engineers and scientists; COBOL for commercial systems processing
streams of record-oriented data. C filled a hitherto empty niche, and unlike FOR-
TRAN and COBOL (which were designed by large committees), the design of C
arose from the ideas and needs of a few individuals working toward a single goal:
developing a high-level language for implementing the UNIX kernel and associated
software. Like the UNIX operating system itself, C was designed by professional
programmers for their own use. The resulting language was small, efficient, power-
ful, terse, modular, pragmatic, and coherent in its design.
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