by Marshall Kirk McKusick

from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie presented the first UNIX paper at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Purdue University in November, 1973. Professor Bob Fabry was in attendance and immediately became interested in obtaining a copy of the system to experiment with at Berkeley.

At the time, Berkeley had only large mainframe computer systems doing batch processing, so the first order of business was to get a PDP-11/45 suitable for running the then current Version 4 of UNIX. The Computer Science Department, together with the Mathematics Department and the Statistics Department were able to jointly purchase a PDP-11/45. In January, 1974, a Version 4 tape was delivered and UNIX was installed by graduate student Keith Standiford.

A Good Buy on UNIX

Special Report by Dean Hannotte

from the June 12, 1984 issue of PC Magazine

The Mark Williams Company’s COHERENT operating system is a rewritten version of the seventh edition of UNIX, with some extensions and enhancements. Regrettably, it has incoherencies.

The Mark Williams Company’s COHERENT operating system is a State-of-the-art microcomputer implementation of AT&T’s UNIX, without the state-of-the-art AT&T licensing fees. It is a completely rewritten version of the seventh edition of UNIX and includes some of its multi-user and multitasking abilities.

from the July 1985 issue of Unix World magazine

by David Spencer

Current third-generation languages such as C and FORTRAN will have to move aside at some point for a new family of fourth-generation languages.

At 30 years old, FORTRAN is graying at the temples; third-generation programming languages are in their heyday. So you are probably wondering how we will speak to computers during the next decade. If current projections hold true, computers will seem (and talk) more like us fairly soon. In order for that to happen, however, current third-generation computer languages (such as C and fortran) will have to move aside for a new family of fourth-generation languages.

Notes from the underground

by Doug Merritt with Ken Arnold and Bob Toxen

from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine

It was 2 am and I was lying face down on the floor in Cory Hall, the EECS building on the UC Berkeley campus, waiting for Bob to finish installing our bootleg copy of the UNIX kernel. If successful, new and improved terminal drivers we had written would soon be up and running.

from the April 15, 1985 issue of ComputerWorld magazine

by Bryan Wilkins

It has taken four years to implement, but an AT&T Unix-based distributed processing system is now being used by a branch of the Internal Revenue Service in its 10 offices.

The project began in 1981 — before distributed processing in a multiuser environment was a popular concept — when IRS planners opted to implement such a system in 10 IRS branch offices. sa Ae

An interview with Bob Marsh

from the December 1984 issue of Unix Review magazine

Many factors have contributed to the birth of a personal UNIX market but none has been more important than Onyx System’s decision to introduce a UNIX-based micro in 1980. Bob Marsh, now chairman of Plexus Computers, made that decision.

Chances are another company would have done the job sooner or later. But Marsh’s timing was critical. The success of the Onyx product showed not only that a UNIX micro port was technically feasible but commercially viable. The object lesson was not lost on OEMs , who were casting about at the time for alternatives to expensive minicomputer systems.

by Otis Wilson

from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine

Thanks to the developers of the UNIX operating system, and to the research method at AT&T Bell Laboratories, the technical evolution of the UNIX System has been well documented and its history largely understood. From a technical perspective, there just isn’t much argument about who did what when and why things were done the way they were.

By August Mohr

from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine

This is, so to speak, a history of how UNIX evolved as a product; not the “official” history of who was responsible for what features, and what year which milestones were crossed, but the “political” history of how decision were made and what motivated the people involved. Most of the readers of this mazagine are familiar with the system itself, so I don’t want to go into great detail about how the system got to be what it is internally, but rather how it how it got to be at all.

from the December 11, 1984 issue of PC Magazine

UNIX fans have always believed their system was better than DOS. Now, with the release of the PC AT, many think UNIX will become the industry’s preferred operating system.

by Gig Graham

The software and hardware standards that have evolved from the remarkable success of the IBM PC and XT have stabilized the microcomputer industry, but at the expense of some sophistication in applications programs developed for the PC.

from the October 1994 issue of Byte magazine

by PETER H. SALUS

New Jersey, in the muggy summer of 1969, was the birthplace of Unix. It was born out of the frustration that resulted when AT&T’s BTL (Bell Telephone Labs) withdrew from the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) project, a joint attempt by BTL, General Electric, and MIT to create an operating system for a large computer accommodating up to a thousand simultaneous users.