Primary sources
These are various technical papers and other writings about UNIX from its creators.
The UNIX Time-Sharing System
This document is the earliest known formal description of the UNIX system. It had a few revisions, and an early draft is available.
- 1971: Draft: The UNIX Time-Sharing System (Txt)
- by Dennis Ritchie
- 1974: The UNIX Time-Sharing System (ACM) (mirror) (mirror 2)
- by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
- Annotated and transcribed PDF
- The text is embedded in a 6th ed manual (1975)
- Republished in Apr 1978 revision (ieee)
- 2nd revision transcribed to HTML
- 1978: Preface to the 2nd revision
- 1978: Foreword to the 2nd revision
- by Douglas McIlroy, Berk Tague and Elliot N. Pinson
- Transcribed to HTML
- Featured in an August edition of Bell System Technical Journal (BSTJ).
- Mirror
Timeline
- 1964: Internal memo from Doug McIlroy
- 1972: Kernel Subroutine Descriptions
- handwritten notes on various UNIX system calls
- 1977: The UNIX Time-sharing System—A Retrospective (mirror)
- by Dennis Ritchie
- 1978: UNIX Implementation (mirror)
- by Ken Thompson
- 1979: The Unix I/O System (source code)
- by Dennis Ritchie
- a description of the v7 system
- 1979: The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System
- 1981: Computer Aids for Writers (ACM)
- by Lorinda Cherry
- Transcribed to HTML, from a MirBSD man page on diction
- 1984: A Stream Input‐Output System
- 1984: A History of UNIX before Berkeley: UNIX Evolution: 1975-1984 (Mirror)
- by Ian F. Darwin and Geoff Collyer
- 1985: Interprocess Communication in the Eight Edition Unix System
- by David L. Presotto and Dennis Ritchie