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IIRC, UNIX started at Bell Labs as a legal document processing system. However, this was just an excuse for Ritchie to work on a game he liked on Multics
by elchief 5y ago
IIRC, UNIX started at Bell Labs as a legal document processing system. However, this was just an excuse for Ritchie to work on a game he liked on Multics
- smhenderson 5y agoWasn't it Ken Thompson who did the game thing? I mean, I know they worked it all out together but I thought it was Ken who wanted to do the Space Travel game... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)
- jjice 5y agoThat's what I was thinking as well. There's also an interview somewhere on YouTube with Ken Thompson talking about this game and he goes off on a bit of a tangent talking about it. Really fun to hear him talk about it.
- smhenderson 5y agoYeah, seems they had a lot of fun with it and at the same time they were making history. It's a great story! I've always been quite fascinated by computer history, Unix history in particular.
- jjice 5y agoThis is a late reply, but I'd check out Unix: A History and Memoir by Brian Kernighan. It came out late 2019 and it was his recount of what Bell Labs and Unix was like in the early days. So much neat history there - I highly recommend that book.
- pjmlp 5y agoThat was the excuse to sponsor the port into PDP-11 hardware, UNIX started on a PDP-7.
- __turbobrew__ 5y agoThis is the correct answer according to Brian W Kernighan’s book “UNIX: A History and a Memoir” page 41