Unix

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

The world's greatest operating system. Developed in the late 60's by AT&T Bell Lab's researcers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. History tells us that Thompson and Ritchie used some leftover hardware to write what amounted to a video game, and the result was the Unix kernel.

Over the years, the Unix kernel was licensed to different companies who made it their own. Sun Microsystems developed SunOS (which was first based on Berkeley unix), Silicon Graphics has IRIX, IBM AIX. The University of California at Berkeley rolled all of their changed into the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) unix, which spawned FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and BSDI. The Mach microkernel spawned Macintosh OS X, OS/2 and Windows NT.

In the early 90s, a finnish student names Linus Torvalds started working on his own version of the unix kernel, which us now running a major percentage of the hosts on the Internet.

Additional Links: * The Creation of the UNIX* Operating System