History & Structure

Unix was written in 1972 by Kernighan & Ritchie at Bell Labs. It has since become the world's dominant operating system for both mainframe host machines and workstations. Its history is as follows:

Despite the divergent routes of its development, the various versions of UNIX remained 75% identical. The divergent versions have now come back together again in System V Release 4. Check Login copyright note to see which version you are running. Nevertheless, some differences in commands remain between the System V and Berkeley BSD versions.

Whichever version of UNIX is used, it communicates with the user only through one of three shells (command processors) as shown below.

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