Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Global Age

Unix and C — portable operating system and systems language — Ritchie and Thompson / Bell Labs

1969 AD · Transmission: Global
ComputingSystemNorth American

Unix and C are one of the most influential generative systems in the history of software. Unix was born in 1969 as a modular, general-purpose operating system at Bell Labs; C was developed between 1969 and 1972 to rewrite it in a portable language. The combination was revolutionary: for the first time a complete operating system could be moved to different hardware architectures by changing only the compiler. Unix introduced the philosophy of small, composable tools; C provided the systems language that dominates infrastructure programming to this day. Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and most internet servers are direct descendants of this pair.

InstitutionBell Laboratories
Historical regionMurray Hill, New Jersey, United States
Primary sourceThompson, K. — Unix, Bell Labs, 1969. Ritchie, D. & Kernighan, B. — C language, 1972. Kernighan, B. & Ritchie, D. — The C Programming Language (Prentice Hall, 1978)
Secondary sourceSalus, P.H. — A Quarter Century of Unix (Addison-Wesley, 1994)
Original languageEnglish
View this entry in the interactive atlas → View in graph →