Brian Kernighan tells us
The birth and development of UNIX, and the stories of its genius developers and contributors.

"The Birth of Unix" is a book that records the history of Unix and is a memoir of those who were involved in the development of Unix.
It meticulously records what Unix is, why it was developed, and what process it went through to develop.
At the same time, it vividly captures the stories of geniuses who challenged countless possibilities while displaying limitless creativity, as well as the Bell Labs site that provided a free research environment.
I hope that as you read this book, you will experience the joy of creating something new and making the world a better place.

“As I recall, it started with a group of people, including Ken, Dennis, and Peter Neumann, standing at the entrance to the office and talking.
“At the time, the system didn't have a name, so (if I remember correctly) I said that it should be called 'UNICS', based on the Latin root, since Multics offered 'everything', whereas the new system offered at most one feature, which was a pun on 'multi' being replaced with 'uni'.”
--- p.83 From “The Origin of the Name”

“The Unix room was just a fun place, there was always something going on.
Some people worked almost exclusively in the Unix room and rarely used the office, while others stopped by several times a day for coffee or conversation.
“The Unix Room was incredibly important in helping us learn about what our colleagues were working on and fostering and maintaining a sense of community.”
--- p.104 From "Unix Room"

“With the advent of the C language, it became possible to write the entire operating system in a high-level language.
In 1973, work was completed to convert Unix from its original assembly language form to the C language.
This makes the system much easier to maintain and modify.
Another major advancement was the ability to port an operating system from its original PDP-11 computer to other computers with different architectures.
Since most of the system code was written in C, porting the operating system didn't require much more than porting the C compiler.”
--- p.117 From "Character Exploration: Dennis Ritchie"

Douglas is a very good technology critic and is often the first to try out new programs or ideas.
He tested programs and ideas as early as possible and had a keen eye.
His opinions on what was good and what needed to be improved were invaluable.
His office was constantly filled with people seeking advice or critique on just about anything, from ideas and algorithms to programs and documents.
Bjarne Stroustrup would first stop by my office to discuss C++ and explain his new ideas, then walk down the hall to Douglas's office a few rooms away to get some serious feedback on the language design.
--- p.162 From "Character Exploration: Douglas McIlroy"

The size of Bell Labs' organization and the scope of its research demonstrated that it had a large number of experts in every technical area, and that these were often world-leading researchers in their respective fields.
Moreover, the culture of the lab was very cooperative and supportive.
It was perfectly normal procedure to walk into someone's office and ask for help.
In almost all cases, the person asked stepped forward and offered help.
There was also a first-class technical library, open 24/7, with a wide range of journals, and remote access to other libraries.
It was similar to a university library, but focused on science and technology.

--- p.305 From “Cooperative Environment”