The software is an operating system called Unix and the record of how it achieved its current unacknowledged dominance is one of the great untold stories of our time. It emerged from Bell Labs — the R&D facility of AT&T, the lightly regulated monopoly that ran the US telephone network for generations.
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were two bright Bell programmers who had been assigned to work with MIT on the design of a complex multi-user operating systemn - Multics. In the end, the plug was pulled on the project, with the result that Bell Labs found itself with two pissed-off hackers on its books. Back in the lab, Ritchie and Thompson decided that they would just have to build the operating system themselves. So, in a fantastic burst of creativity they wrote Unics. Inevitably the ‘cs’ became ‘x’ and Unix was born...
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