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“UNIX” is the name of a time-sharing system for PDP11 computers, written by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories. It was described by them in the July, 1974 issue of the “Communications of the ACM”.
UNIX has proved to be effective, efficient and reliable in operation and was in use at more than 150 installations by the end of 1976.
The amount of effort to write UNIX, while not inconsiderable in itself (~10 man years up to the release of the Level Six system) is insignificant when compared to other systems. (For instance, by 1968, OS/360 was reputed to have consumed more then five man millennia and TSS/360, another IBM operating system, more than one man millennium.)
Of course there are systems which are easier to understand than UNIX but, it may be asserted, these are invariably much simpler and more modest in what they attempt to achieve. As far as the list of features offered to users is concerned, UNIX is in the “big league”. In fact it offers many features which are notable by their absence from some of the well-known major systems.
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