UNIX: Genesis and design features

Abstract

UNIX was primarily designed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. It was, and continues to be, regarded as a seminal contribution to operating systems design methodology, architecture and research. The primary strengths of UNIX lie in the soundness of underlying design principles. This article aims at providing insights into the making of UNIX and in particular, how the notion of open software helped in taking a utility- and tool-driven approach. This approach provides both usability1 and extensibility besides maintainability. In fact, we see that the designers used best software architecture practices. We discuss UNIX shell and its operating environment, kernel, file systems, process creation and management, version management and documentation standard. Every effort has been made to quote from authentic sources to trace history.