Computing · 1969

Unix

A small, elegant operating system that spread everywhere.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs wrote Unix on a PDP-7, favoring small tools joined by pipes. Its descendants run most servers, all Apple devices and Android.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 1

Time-sharing 1961

What it led to 3

C 1972
GNU Project 1983
Linux 1991

Watch

AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating SystemAT&T Tech Channel · YouTube

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6

Fastest supercomputer Latest: 1.81B GFLOP/s (2025) Source: Our World in Data