Diomidis Spinellis on History of Unix
Unix was created at the end of the sixties by Ken Thompson who worked at Bell Labs at that time (although the name ‘Unix’ was only used a few years later). Bell Labs participated in developing a time sharing operating system, together with MIT and General Electric, called Multics. Eventually, Bell Labs opted out of the project but Thompson continued on the work already done. Well, and the rest is history.
Diomidis Spinellis created a repository on the history of Unix. Spinellis is a Professor in the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece. The repositary covers the period from its inception in 1970 as a 2.5 thousand line kernel with 26 commands, to 2017 as a widely-used 27 million line system. The 1.1GB repository contains half a million commits and 2,523 branch merges. The repository employs the commonly used Git version control system for its storage, and is hosted on the popular GitHub archive. It has been created by synthesizing with custom software 24 snapshots of systems developed at Bell Labs, the University of California at Berkeley, and the 386BSD team, two legacy repositories, and the modern repository of the open source FreeBSD system. In total, about one thousand individual contributors are identified, the early ones through primary research. The data set is being used for empirical research in the evolution of code, programming practices, and architecture.
On April 5 2017, Spinellis will give a lecture entitled ‘The Unix history repository: Its creation, contents, and use’ at our group in Delft.
Location: Delft University of Technology, Faculty EEMCS (building 36), Dijkstrazaal (9th floor), 15.00 hrs. Welcome!
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo https://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/
