History of Unix
The UNIX operating system was created at Bell Laboratories -- then the research arm of AT&T -- in the early 1970's. The name was an intentional pun on "Multics", the name of a very sophisticated and intricate operating system developed at MIT. UNIX, which adopted a philosophy commonly known to engineers as KISS ("Keep it simple, stupid"), was said to be "castrated Multics" because of its emphasis on simplicity. Written in the C language (itself developed at Bell Labs), UNIX was designed to run interactively -- rather than accepting and returning output in batches, like most computers of the day -- on relatively simple hardware.
The first scholarly paper on UNIX was presented by researchers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Purdue University in November 1973. The paper sparked immediate interest on the part of professors and graduate students at UC Berkeley, who installed UNIX Version 4 on a PDP-11/45 in January 1974. The operating system proved popular with students and faculty alike, and before long, many at the University were using it, improving it, and writing software for it. .