Welcome to the UNIX History website. Actually, that's rather a grand name. This is just a site which was originally created to hold a few historical bits. It's grown a bit, and has a few useful links as well.

It's stark, basic, and hand-coded!

Bob's slides

Here are the slides and recordings from the three lectures given by Bob.

Slides

The slides can be downloaded here:

• A Short History of UNIX - Part I
• A Short History of UNIX - Part II
• Using UNIX

If you have trouble downloading these files with Internet Explorer, try a different browser.

Recordings

The MP3 files can be downloaded here:

• A Short History of UNIX - Part I
• A Short History of UNIX - Part II
• Using UNIX

Codeharbour

Bob did a condensed version of his talk at Codeharbour, in two shorter parts. The video recordings of these are here:

• https://youtu.be/ro1EEk8WSr8?si=crP2XRMTGdt1SZ7e
• https://youtu.be/1Fx6_Apv65A?si=8Hnpdwh_wgYa1eLO

What else is here?

Look at the sidebar to the left. Currently, there's a page on GNU and the Free Software Foundation, with links to interesting stuff. Separately, there are links to books mentioned in the lectures, and others that might be of interest.

There are lots of general links to related material, too, including the original published paper on the UNIX system. This explains the whole UNIX ethos very nicely.

There's some fun stuff, including a history of hacks at MIT.

Should you wish to play with historical systems (e.g. the Sixth Edition, Mini-UNIX, or 4.xBSD), it's easy to set up a simulator on your PC or Mac, and run that actual system.

Lastly, there are some ideas on what to do next, if all this fires your interest.

Acknowledgement

This site was built by, and is maintained by, Bob Eager who can be contacted via these pages if you would like more information. Click on any occurrence of his name to contact him.