A Brief History of Unix This document is designed to give people with no previous UNIX experience some sense of what UNIX is. This document will cover the history of UNIX and an introduction to UNIX. HISTORY OF UNIX AND CAUSES FOR ITS POPULARITY Most discussions of UNIX begin with the history of UNIX without explaining why the history of UNIX is important to understanding UNIX. The remainder of this document will describe some strengths and weaknesses of UNIX and attempt to explain why UNIX is becoming popular. All of UNIX's strengths and weaknesses can be directly related to the history of its development, hence a discussion of history is very useful. UNIX was originally developed at Bell Laboratories as a private research project by a small group of people starting in 1969. This group had experience with a number of different operating systems research efforts in the 1970's.
