Bell
Laboratories joins with MIT and General Electric to develop Multics.
1970
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie develop UNIX.
1971
The B-language version of the operating system runs on a PDP-11.
1973
UNIX is rewritten in the C language.
1974
Thompson and Ritchie publish a paper and generate enthusiasm in the academic community. Berkeley starts the BSD program.
1975
The first licensed version of BSD UNIX is released.
1979
Bill Joy introduces “Berkeley enhancements” as BSD 4.1.
1982
AT&T first markets UNIX. Sun Microsystems is founded by Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy with $4 million in venture capital.
1983
Sun Microsystems introduces SunOS.
1984
About 100,000 UNIX sites exist worldwide. Sun now has 400 employees and $39 million in annual sales.
1988
AT&T and Sun start work on SVR4, a unified version of UNIX.
1988
OSF and UI are formed.
1989
AT&T releases
System V, release 4.
1990
OSF releases OSF/1.
1992
Sun introduces Solaris, which is based on System V, release 4. SunOS, which is based on BSDF UNIX, will be phased out. Sun now has more than 12,500 employees and more than $3.5 billion in sales.
1993
Novell buys UNIX from AT&T.
1994
Solaris 2.4 is available.
1995
Santa Cruz Operation buys UNIXware from Novell. SCO and HP announce a relationship to develop a 64-bit version of UNIX. Solaris 2.5 is available.
