Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

Computer archaeology lovers among the audience are in for a rare treat in these challenging times. Remember that Unix v4 tape ...

UNIX version 4 is quite special on account of being the first UNIX to be written in C instead of PDP-11 ASM, but it was also ...

Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow ...

Two weeks ago frequent contributors p_msac and bportlock challenged me to see Linux as not Unix and to discuss the consequences of that difference. The reality here is simple: Linus Torvalds started ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

Almost everyone thinks that Unix originated with Thomson, Ritchie, and others at Bell Labs in 1969/70, and that's correct but not true. They wrote the first code, originated many of the technologies ...

It probably shouldn’t, but it routinely astonishes me how much we live on the Web. Even I find myself going entire boots without using anything but the Web browser. With such an emphasis on Web-based ...

Last week I briefly departed from reality, thanks to the inexplicable actions of the CRTC, but this week, I’m off the drugs and back on terra firma — sort of. Anyway, to celebrate my return to the ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...