Unix History

A series on where Unix came from, how it spread and how the industry that grew around it tore it apart — checked against the primary sources.

Episodes appear in reading order. Each one ends with its sources and an explicit list of the places where the commonly told version of the story is wrong.

The Rise of Unix — and the Seeds of Its Fall

Episode 1 of the Unix History series: from the collapse of Multics in 1969 to the 1983 release of 4.2BSD — the years in which Unix went from a side project on a …