Unix is where many things started, and there is much to be understood in a study of Unix alone. However, there were many developments outside the scope of, but closely related to Unix in some way.
In particular, branches closer to the epoch (1970) are of great interest.
Timeline
- 1975: MERT - a multi-environment real-time operating system (1977 BSTJ Article)
- by Heinz Lycklama and Douglas L. Bayer
- 1982: (YouTube) BLIT.
- 1983, The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal (.ps)
- An early Graphical User Interface (GUI) created by Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi for Unix.
- a programmable bitmap graphics terminal
- 1983: GNU announced
- 1985: Munix, Vol III
- Munix, created by a German company called PCS based on SystemV Unix. Hubbard would go on to help create FreeBSD.
- 1987: Minix
- 1989: 📼 The Computer Chronicles: UNIX
- 2nd episode on UNIX, 4 years after the first
- large segment on GUIs, one from Sun Microsystems and another from HP
- some challenges are described,
- 1991: Linux
- Computer hacker Linus Torvalds realizes there's not a single free kernel available anywhere that is any good
- Much to GNU's complement, Linux is a spiritual copy of the Unix kernel
- Like Unix, it was initially designed on a much smaller computer (in this case Torvald's own i386 machine), before being ported to dozens of other systems, large and small
- 2001 talk available: "The Origins of Linux"
- The "1.0" release was tagged later, in 1994.
- 1992: UTF-8
- still the most widely used encoding scheme on the Internet (>90%)
- See full history from the 1989 ISO draft
- 1995: Plan 9 from Bell Labs