40 years of Unix

Yes, the operating system that you’ve never wanted to use is celebrating 40 years of life. As you may know, Unix represents the basis for all Linux distributions; but did you know that also Mac OS X based their operating system versions in Unix? Well, what this operating system represents it’s a lot more that you may think.

Born in 1969 as “Unics” from two guys named Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, has a long way and a lot of history. Written originally in Assembler programming language, quickly changed the code since one of the founders also developed the “C” language. Bill Joy, in 1978 created 1BSD, operating system also based in Unix, that will later represent in other important developments like BSD, FreeBSD, SunOS and Mac OS X.

Other ramifications of this development, produced Minix OS for academic proposals, that later Linus Trovalds will use to build the first Linux distribution in 1991. Here’s a very nice picture that will help you understand a lot more of these ramifications:

Closing the article, here’s a quote from Joel Spolsky that talks about Windows and Linux:

“What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that’s the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary.”