[Rare systems]

After watching this go on for a while without resolving itself I pulled out my copy of _A Quarter Century of UNIX_ by Peter H. Salus. According to Salus, Thompson started work on what was to become Unix in the summer of 1969 on a PDP-7. Within a month the basic system had been developed including and assembler, editor, and a shell. The PDP-11/20 arrived in the summer of 1970 without a disk. According to Salus according to Ritchie: "We got the PDP-11 very early. It came during the summer of 1970. Only the processor and memory arrived, there was no disc. It was all paper tape software, you loaded things with paper tape, there was no operating system as such. The first Unix for it was written cross-assembling from the PDP-7 using the PDP-7 assembler that was written in B." There is a list on p.43 listing the 10 AT&T Bell Laboratories editions of the Unix Programmer's Manual: First Edition November 3, 1971 Second Edition June 12, 1972 Third Edition February 1973 Fourth Edition November 1973 Fifth Edition June 1974 Sixth Edition May 1975 Seventh Edition January 1979 Eighth Edition February 1985 Ninth Edition September 1986 Tenth Edition October 1989 All typos are mine. To sum up: it all started in the summer of 1969. The first edition of unix was produced in 1971. Also Dennis Ritchie has a home page with a link to a document on the early development of Unix at: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~dmr Look for `The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System,'. _A Quarter Century of UNIX_ is very good. I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to know more about the history of Unix. --pec -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Antique Computer Collection: http://www.wco.com/~pcoad/machines.html On Sun, 17 May 1998, Sam Ismail wrote: