UNIX: Difference between revisions

[[File:dilbert_unix_5611.png|link=Dilbert|frame|This strip (06/24/1995) is [[Shout -Out|on the cover]] of the popular textbook ''Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment'']]

Thompson had a pet project going on Bell's Multics machine, a game called ''[[Space Travel (Video Game)|Space Travel]]'', but at several dollars (in 1969 money) per run, using it was not economically sound. Looking for a cheaper alternative (as well as a new project to work on), he spotted a spare [[wikipedia:PDP-7|DEC PDP-7]] in his lab, and began porting ''Space Travel'' to it. As he did, he found himself recreating various parts of Multics around it; eventually, he had a file system, kernel and utilities ready to go. Since it was kind of like Multics, but "neutered", he decided to call the new system [[Incredibly Lame Pun|"Unics"]]. Eventually, after getting a more powerful system (a DEC PDP-11) to improve Unics and work on the first real application for it (a typesetting package that eventually became ''nroff''), Ken and his development partner Dennis Ritchie started setting the name in small caps, at which point it mutated into "UNIX," which would have been displayed as "{{smallcaps|Unix}}" with Ritchie's formatting.

A lot of tropes associated with UNIX from the start began here; Multics had long, [[Exactly What It Says Onon the Tin|self-explanatory]] commands with much shorter aliases, and UNIX generally just used the shorter forms (like ''ls'', ''cp'', etc.) directly. Back in those days, your terminal was very likely going to be a clunky old Teletype 33 printing terminal, and when the terminal was capable of about 10 ''characters'' per second, brevity counted. Also, the PDP-7 in particular didn't have much memory, and Multics' way of handling communications between running programs would have been massive overkill, so Ken and Dennis came up with "pipes", a feature even non-UNIX OSes like Windows NT use now.