Richard Jensen: Unix at 50: How the OS that Powered Smartphones Started from Failure https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/unix-at-50-it-starts-with-a-mainframe-a-gator-and-three-dedicated-researchers/: 'Today, Unix powers iOS and Android—its legend begins with a gator and a trio of researchers.... In 1965, the GE 645 that Bell Labs used to develop Multics cost almost as much as a Boeing 737. Thus, there was widespread interest in time sharing.... Multics was conceived with that goal in mind. It kicked off in 1964 and had an initial delivery deadline of 1967. MIT, where a primitive time-sharing system called CTSS had already been developed and was in use, would provide the specs, GE would provide the hardware, and GE and Bell Labs would split the programming tasks.... Thompson bundled up the various pieces of the PDP-7—a machine about the size of a refrigerator, not counting the terminal—moved it into a closet assigned to the acoustics department, and got it up and running. One way or another, they convinced acoustics to provide space for the computer and also to pay for the not infrequent repairs to it.... By September, the computer science department at Bell Labs had an operating system running on a PDP-7—and it wasn’t Multics...
#noted #2019-12-30
