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Part I

During the formative years in the creation of the Arpanet, which was to become the backbone to the Global Computer Network, there were similar seminal developments taking place at the Bell Laboratories, the Research and Development unit of the Bell System. These developments were to have a significant impact on the future course of computer science research and networking in the world. As early as 1957, Bell Labs found they needed an operating system for their inhouse computer center which was then running lots of short batch jobs. Describing the situation facing the Labs, Victor Vyssotsky, who had been involved the techanical head of the Multics project at Bell Labs and later Executive Director of Research in the Information Systems Division of AT&T Bell Labs, explains, " We just couldn't take the time to get them on and off the machine manually. We needed an operating system to sequence jobs through and control machine resources." (from "Putting Unix in Perspective", Interview with Victor Vyssotsky, by Ned Pierce, in Unix Review, Jan. 1985, pg. 59)

The BESYS operating system was created at Bell Labs to deal with their inhouse needs. When asked by others outside the labs to make a copy available, they did so but with no obligation to provide support. "There was no support when we shipped a BESYS tape to somebody," Vyssotsky recalls, "we would answer reasonable questions over the telephone. If they found troubles or we found troubles, we would provide fixes." (Ibid., pg. 59)

By 1964, however, the Labs was adopting third generation computer equipment and had to decide whether they would build their own operating system or go with one that was built outside the Labs. Vyssotsky recounts the process of deliberation at the time, "Through a rather murky process of internal deliberation we decided to join forces with General Electric and MIT to create Multics," he explains. The Labs planned to use the Multics operating system "as a mainstay for Bell Laboratories internal service computing in precisely the way that we had used the BESYS operating system." (Ibid., pg. 59)

The collaborative project by GE, MIT and AT&T to create a computer operating system that would be called Multics (1965-68) was to "show that general-purpose, multiuser, timesharing systems were viable." (See Douglas Comer, "Pervasive Unix: Cause for Celebration," Unix Review, October, 1985, pg. 42) Based on the results of research gained at MIT using the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), AT&T and G.E. agreed to work with MIT to build a "new hardware, a new operating system, a new file system, and a new user interface." (Ibid.) Though the project proceeded slowly and it took several additional years to develop Multics, Doug Comer, a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, explains that "fundamental issues were uncovered, new approaches were explored and new mechanisms were invented." (Ibid) The most important, he explains, was that "participants and observers alike became devoted to a new form of computing (the interactive, multiuser, timesharing system.). As a result, the Multics project dominated computer systems research for many years, and many of its results are still considered seminal." (Ibid.)

Evaluating the influence of the MULTICS research on Bell Labs researchers, Comer points out that top researchers in computer science and mathematics from the world's premier industrial research center, Bell Labs, were able to work with top researchers from academia. When Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and their "Bell Laboratories colleagues," writes Comer, "later began work on their own implementation of a Multics-like time-sharing system, they drew heavily from the Multics experience. So, despite popular myth, UNIX was not an accidental discovery at all -- it evolved directly from experiences with academic research." (Ibid., pg. 41-42)

By 1969, however, AT&T made a decision to withdraw from the project. Describing that period, Dennis Ritchie, another of the inventors of unix at Bell Labs writes, "By 1969, Bell Labs management, and even the researchers came to believe that the promises of Multics could be fulfilled only too late and too expensively." (from Dennis Ritchie, "The Development of the C Language," ACM, presented at Second History of Programming Languages conference, Cambridge, Mass, April 1993, pg. 1)

Detailing the reasons for the decision, Vyssotsky responds, "It turned out that from our point of view the Multics effort simply went awry. In the first place, we were naive about how hard it was going to be to create an operating system as ambitious as Multics. It was the familiar second system syndrome. You put in everything you wished you'd had in the other one." (Vyssotsky, pg. 59) Also he details how GE, MIT, and AT&T each had different goals for the project, which made it difficult for them to work together. While GE wanted to develop Multics to "strengthen its product line," MIT wanted Multics "to advance the state of art" of computing, and Bell Labs' purpose was to have a good environment for our people to work in." (Ibid.) Given these different objectives, Vyssotsky explains, "It turned out that under the stress of slipping schedules and the increasing realization that we had difficulty agreeing on a common course of action, we ended up simply pulling out of Multics. We said, `OK, it's too wet to plow. We aren't going to get from here to there'." (Ibid.)

When the decision to pull out of the Multics project was made by AT&T, Vyssotsky explains there was an operating system that he called a "precursor of Multics" running on their GE 645 computer. "From the point of view of the few people who could use it," he notes, "it was a very nice programming environment. In particular, Ken Thompson thought it was a very nice programming environment." (Ibid.)

However, when Bell Labs pulled out of the Multics project they took the Multics precursor off their GE 645 computer and put up GECOS, a much less state of the art operating system. "If you were an old line Spanish American War type computer user like me," Vyssotsky admits, "GECOS was a perfectly satisfactory system for getting from here to there in a well-designed application. You knew what it was going to do." (Ibid., pg. 60)

But for a research computer scientist like Ken Thompson, GECOS was inadequate. According to Vyssotsky, "It was nowhere near as satisfactory if you were trying to do things that were technically difficult and imperfectly defined, which is the main task of research." (Ibid.)

Not only for Ken Thompson's work, but for the research purposes of the Labs, an operating system more like what Multics had promised was needed. "I wanted a much more flexible system than BESYS or GECOS or OS360 or anything I could see," Vyssotsky recounts, "I had various things that I was trying to do with computers that were just plain hard to do with existing operating systems." (Ibid.)

"Moreover, for people like Ken Thompson," Vyssotsky emphasizes, "having this embryonic version of Multics taken away and GECOS slapped down in its place was something of a disaster. Suddenly they were back to square one." (Ibid.)

With the loss of the Multics experimental operating system, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and the others at the Labs who began work on UNIX, realized they had to focus on creating an operating system for their programming needs. "I don't think," Vyssotsky relates, "that either of them was particularly fascinated by operating systems until they found themselves cast back upon GECOS. They sort of got interested in the subject out of self defense." (Ibid.)

In his account of this period, Dennis Ritchie writes, "Even before the GE-645 Multics machine was removed from the premises, an informal group, led primarily by Ken Thompson, had begun investigating alternatives." (Ritchie, pg. 1)

Thompson and Ritchie presented Bell Labs with proposals to buy them a computer so they could build their own interactive, time sharing operating system. Their proposals weren't acted on. Eventually, Ken Thompson found a little used and obsolete PDP 7 computer. According to Vyssotsky the orphaned PDP-7 computer was a tiny machine, "more nearly in the class of a Commodore 64 than the class of a PC-AT." (Vyssotsky, pg. 60)

Ritchie explains that Ken Thompson was attempting to create a programming environment which included "many of the innovative aspects of Multics," such as "an explicit notion of a process as a locus of control, a tree-structured file system, a command interpreter as a user-level program, simple representation of text files, and generalized access to devices." (Ritchie, pg. 1-2)

Describing the primitive conditions that Thompson faced, Ritchie writes, "At the start, Thompson "did not even program on the PDP itself, but instead used a set of macros for the GEMAP assembler on a GE-635 machine. A postprocesser generated a paper tape readable by the PDP-7. These tapes were carried from the GE machine to the PDP-7 for testing until a primitive UNIX kernel, an editor, an assembler, a simple shell (command interpreter), and a few utilities (like the Unix rm, cat, cp commands) were completed. At this point, the operating system was self- supporting; programs could be written and tested without resort to paper tape, and development continued on the PDP-7 itself." (Ibid., pg 2)

The result, Ritchie explains, was that "Thompson's PDP-7 assembler outdid even DEC's in simplicity; it evaluated expressions and emitted the corresponding bits. There were no libraries, no loader or link editor: the entire source of a program was presented to the assembler, and the output file -- with a fixed name -- that emerged was directly executable. (Ibid., pg. 2)

The operating system was named UNIX, to distinguish it from the complexity of MULTICS. Vyssotsky recalls that in addition to Thompson and Ritchie, "the two most active contributors at that stage were Joe Ossanna and Rudd Canaday. I should also add," he explains, "that Doug McIlroy was tremendously influential on their thinking." (Vyssotsky, pg.60) Vyssotsky elaborates, "I don't think that Doug actually contributed much of the programming, but for example, the appearance of pipes in UNIX was clearly a result of Doug's discussions with Ken and Dennis." (Ibid.) Ken put them in, but "it was McIlroy who said, "Look you ought to do it. Pipes, like most things in UNIX were not a radically new idea. Co-routines had, after all, shown up in SIMULA by the end of 1967." (Ibid.)

As work continued on the Bell Labs operating system, the researchers developed a set of principles to guide their work. Among these principles were:

"(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.

(iii)Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

(iv)Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them."

(from M.D. McIlroy, E.N.Pinson, and B.A. Tague "Unix Time-Sharing System Forward", The Bell System Technical Jounal, July -Aug 1978 vol 57, number 6 part 2, pg. 1902)

By 1970, Ritchie writes, the UNIX researchers were "able to acquire a new DEC PDP-11. The processor," he remembers, "was among the first of its line delivered by DEC, and three months passed before its disk arrived." (Ritchie, pg. 5) Soon after the machine's arrival and while "still waiting for the disk, Thompson," Ritchie recalls, "recoded the Unix kernel and some basic commands in PDP assembly language. Of the 24K bytes of memory on the machine, the earliest PDP-11 Unix system used 12K bytes for the operating system, a tiny space for user programs, and the remainder as a RAM disk." (Ibid., pg. 5) "By 1971," Ritchie writes, "our miniature computer center was beginning to have users. We all wanted to create interesting software more easily. Using assembler was dreary enough that B, despite its performance problems, had been supplemented by a small library of useful service routines and was being used for more and more new programs." (Ibid., pg. 6)

"C came into being in the years 1969-1973," Ritchie explains, "in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972." (Ibid., pg. 1) "By early 1973," the essential of modern C were complete. The language and compiler were strong enough to permit us to rewrite the kernel for the PDP-11 in C during the summer of that year. (Thompson had made a brief attempt to produce a system coded in an early version of C -- before structures -- in 1972, but gave up the effort.)" (Ibid.)

Each program they built developed some simple capability and they called that program a tool. They wanted the programs to be fun to use and to be helpful to programmers. Describing the achievements of the lab, Doug McIlroy, one of the researchers and Thompson's Dept Head when they created UNIX, describes the atmosphere at the lab:

"Constant discussions honed the system....Should tools usually accept output file names? How to handle demountable media? How to manipulate addresses in a higher level language? How to minimize the information deducible from a rejected login? Peer pressure and simple pride in workmanship caused gobs of code to be rewritten or discarded as better or more basic ideas emerged. Professional rivalry and protection of turf were practically unknown: so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations." [from M.D. McIlroy, "Unix on My Mind," Proc. Virginia Computer Users Conference, vol 21, Sept. 1991, Blacksburg, pg. 1-6.]

The research done at the Labs was concerned with using the computer to automate programming tasks. By a scientific approach to their work and careful attention to detail, Bell Labs researchers determined the essential elements in a design and then created a program to do as simple a job as possible. These simple computer automation tools would then be available to build programs to do more complicated tasks.

They created a UNIX kernel accompanied by a toolbox of programs that could be used by others at Bell Labs. The kernel consisted of about 11,000 lines of code. Eventually, 10,000 lines of the code were rewritten in C and thus could be transported to other computer systems. "The kernel," Ken Thompson writes, "is the only UNIX code that cannot be substituted by a user to his own liking. For this reason, the kernel should make as few real decisions as possible." (from K. Thompson, "UNIX Implementation", "The Bell System Technical Journal," vol 57, No. 6, July-August 1978, pg. 1931)

Thompson describes creating the kernel:

"What is or is not implemented in the kernel represents both a great responsibility and a great power. It is a soap-box platform on `the way things should be done.' Even so, if `the way' is too radical, no one will follow it. Every important decision was weighed carefully. Throughout, simplicity has been substituted for efficiency. Complex algorithms are used only if their complexity can be localized." (Ibid., pg. 1931-2)

The kernel was conceived as what was essential and other features were left to be developed as part of the tools or software that would be available. Thompson explains:

The UNIX kernel is an I/O multiplexer more than a complete operating system. This is as it should be. Because of this outlook, many features are found in most other operating systems that are missing from the UNIX kernel. For example, the UNIX kernel does not support file access methods, file disposition, file formats, file maximum sizes, spooling, command language, logical records, physical records, assignment of logical file names, logical file names, more than one character set, an operator's console, an operator, log-in, or log-out. Many of these things are symptoms rather than features. Many of these things are implemented in user software using the kernel as a tool. A good example of this is the command language. Maintenance of such code is as easy as maintaining user code. The idea of implementing "system" code and general user primitives comes directly from MULTICS." (Ibid., pg. 1945-6)

Evaluating the achievement represented by the kernel, Vyssotsky explains, "I would say that the greatest intellectual achievement embedded in UNIX is the success Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie had in understanding how much you could leave out of an operating system without impairing its capability." (Vyssotsky, pg. 60-62)

"To some extent," he continues, "that was forced by the fact that they were running on small machines. It may also have been a reaction to the complexity of Multics...It took some very clear thinking on the part of the creators of UNIX to realize that most of that stuff didn't have anything to do with the operating system and didn't have to be included." (Ibid., pg. 62)

Eventually the unix operating system was adopted in other departments at AT&T to do a variety of work. "There is one piece of history that I think is very important to understand," explains Vyssotsky, "When UNIX evolved within Bell Laboratories, it was not a result of some deliberate management initiative. It spread through channels of technical need and technical contact....This was typical of the way UNIX spread around Bell Laboratories. You had MTSS Supervisors and Department Heads saying we had to go in this direction while Executive Directors were saying, `Well, I'm awful nervous about it. But if you guys say that is what we've got to do, I'll back your play." (Ibid, pg. 62-64)

Explaining the importance of how unix was implemented organizationally within the Bell System, Vyssotsky comments, "There are a lot of organizations that do not work that way. I brought out that little hunk of history to point out that the spread and success of UNIX, first in the Bell organizations and then in the rest of the world, was due to the fact that it was used, modified, and tinkered up in a whole variety of organizations within Bell Laboratories....The refinement of UNIX was not done as the result of some management initiative or council of vice presidents. It was the supervisors saying, "This thing is already better than our other options and flexible enough for us to make it a go." (Ibid. pg. 64)

During the same period that the search for an operating system to replace the promise of Multics had begun by Bell Labs computer programming researchers, the Bell System was faced with the problem of automating their telephone operations using minicomputers. Describing the problem facing the Bell System during this period, August Mohr, in an article in Unix Review, "The Genesis Story" (January 1985, pg. 22), writes "Bell was starting to perceive the need for minicomputer support for its telephone operations." (Mohr was editor of /usr/group 's CommUNIXations newsletter.)

"The discovery that we had the need -- or actually, the opportunity -- in the early '70s to use these minis to support telephone company operations encouraged us to work with the UNIX system," confirms Berkley Tague. ("Interview with Berkley Tague," Unix Review, June 1985, pg. 59) "We knew we could do a better job with maintenance, traffic control, repair, and accounting applications." (Ibid.)

"The existing systems were made up of people and paper," he relates, "The phone business was in danger of being overwhelmed in the early '70s with the boom of the '60s. There was a big interest then in using computers to help manage that part of the business. We wanted to get rid of all of those Rolodex files and help those guys who had to pack instruments and parts back and forth just to keep things going."

During the late 1960's, AT&T was under pressure from regulatory bodies like the New York Public Service Commission, to solve what was termed as a "service crisis." (See especially, "Wrong Number," by Alan Stone, N.Y., 1989, pg. 145) This pressure encouraged AT&T to explore technological advances that would make its support operations more efficient.

Tague explains that there had been local mechanization of processes but not large scale integration of the mechanization. "Take repair," he suggests as an example, "A lot of it deals with keeping the connections straight between what we call the main distribution frames in the central office and the wires that tie residential telephones into the switch. Prior to the use of computers, `mechanization' consisted of somebody on a remote test bench using electrical meters and instruments to test lines. To get those connections made, an intercom was used to broadcast requests to a bunch of people standing around with alligator clips and soldering irons down in the wire center. The requests went something like, `Would you kindly connect jumper x to terminal y?' to get testing done." (Ibid, pg. 60)

Tague describes how the mini computer made it possible to automate this process. "First, we were able to get more instructions out to the people actually making the connections. And, at the other end, we were able to centralize information about entire systems and end-to-end circuits."

"This meant," he elaborates, "that if I was responsible for keeping the Superbowl broadcast on the air between New Orleans and New York, I could -- with a single console -- view all the connections on that link and have access to all of the information automatically being collected about it. If something broke, I could immediately recognize that and orchestrate the process of getting it repaired. The repair itself would ultimately be left to a person working in much the same way as before." (Ibid.)

This change affected workers like those "plugging in an alternate module or pulling a manual switch and going to a backup system," he clarifies. "Suddenly, their work became much faster because the information was all in one place -- unlike earlier days when eight guys would have had to collect and sort out the trouble data in a series of phone calls before actually being able to get down to the business of working on solutions." (Ibid.)

Other applications were affected as well, he explains. "in areas like cable and wiring layouts. The algorithms applying to these layouts were well known here at the Laboratories, but they were not the sort of thing you could usefully put into a manual. They were, however, easily put into computer programs. Optimum layouts could thus be generated using the computer to assess all the complicated engineering tradeoffs." (Ibid.)

Not only did they need a good programming environment, but Mohr emphasized that the Bell System applications required, "Operations Systems, not Operating Systems. With the number of systems under consideration, the possiblity of being tied to a single vendor, or having each site tied to a different vendor, induced a kind of paranoia. There just had to be another way." (Mohr, pg. 22)

Tague elaborates, "If we faced the phone company with 18 different vendors and 19 different environments, neither the developers nor the phone companies were going to be able to maintain the thing once it got out in the field in large numbers. As a planner, I was trying to focus on a few vendors. At that time, it was primarily Hewlett-Packard and DEC, plus a few IBM systems." (Tague, pg. 60)

This led to the realization of a need for an operating system. "Vendor operating systems were available as a starting point", he adds "but a number of people had already started to build their own when they realized that what the vendors had was not adequate." (Ibid.)

Tague explains that his role in planning for the transition meant that he tried to warn those involved that they would need a good software environment to do the development of the software needed to use the mini computers for these new roles.

"I observed," he comments, "that people were starting to put these minis out in the operating company, and saw that it was an area of both opportunity and potential problems. I found," he adds, "that some of the people in development had never built an operating system for any computer before; many of them had very little software background. They were coming out of hardware development and telephone technology backgrounds, and yet were starting to build their own operating systems. Having been through that phase of the business myself, it seemed silly to go through it another hundred times, so I started pushing the UNIX operating system into these projects." (Mohr, pg. 22)

Tague was familiar with UNIX and its capabilities and tells the variety of reasons ranging from inadequate file systems, to inadequate performance, to poor user interface that he recommended the initial adoption of UNIX to start the work. "We sold those first application developers on UNIX simply by pointing out that the first job they were going to have to do was program development and that by using the UNIX operating system they could get that job done more easily. I did not argue with them about whether or not they should develop their own operating systems -- knowing in my heart of hearts that once they got on UNIX they wouldn't be able to do any better with the experience and the schedules they had. Indeed, that is what happened." (Tague, pg. 60-1)

Tague's backing of UNIX, as a development system for operations, was not just a personal preference. "I had every confidence in the people who built it because I'd worked with them on Multics," he explained. "With their experience and training, I figured they could build a much better operating system than somebody who's building one for the first time, no matter how smart that person is." (Mohr, pg 22)

Tague describes how UNIX had been functioning in the research environment and thus had demonstrated that it could be used as a beginning basis for this important job.

Also, he knew that there would be a need to develop a support system for those operating companies around the country that would begin to use UNIX: "We were starting to put these things in the operating companies all around the countryside," explains Tague, "and the prospects were that there were going to be several hundred minis over the next few years that were going to have to be maintained with all their software and hardware." (Ibid., pg. 24)

Bell had created the needed field support system to maintain the electronic switching machines and software that were now being upgraded. "Supporting a network of minicomputers would be a significantly different problem, though," August Mohr explains. "Maintaining an operating system is not at all like maintaining an electronic switching system. The minicomputers had different reliablity demands, requiring a different support structure in the organization -- one that did not yet exist in any form. In many ways, the operations group was breaking new ground," writes Mohr. (Ibid.)

As head of the Computer Planning Department, Tague had been responsible for systems engineering. In 1971 Tague garnered support for UNIX to be adopted. Then he pushed to have UNIX made the internal standard and to provide central support through his organization. By September, 1973, he was able to form a development organization to provide support for a "standard Unix." This group, called UNIX Development Support worked with Bell Labs Research. Though the two groups sometimes diverged regarding their priorities, Mohr explains that they agreed on the need for UNIX portability.

According to Mohr, "Tague foresaw the possiblity of UNIX becoming an inteface between hardware and software that would allow applications to keep running while the hardware underneath was changing." (Ibid., pg. 24)

"From the support point of view," he continues, "such a capability would solve a very important problem. Without UNIX and its potential portability, the people building the operations support systems were faced with selecting an outside vendor that could supply the hardware on which to get their devlopment done. Once that was complete, they would be locked into that vendor." However, according to Mohr, "Portability obviated this limitation and offered a number of other advantages. When making a hardware upgrade, even to equipment from the same vendor, there are variations version to version. That could cost a lot of money in software revisions unless there were some level of portability already written into the scenario." (Ibid., pg. 24-25)

Just as Operating Systems people in the Bell system had come to recognize the need for portability in a computer operating system, Ritchie and Thompson and the other programming researchers at Bell Labs had created the computer language C and rewritten the majority of the UNIX kernel in C and thus had made the important breakthrough in creating a computer operating system that was not machine dependent. Describing their breakthrough with UNIX, Thompson and Ritchie presented their first paper on UNIX at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, October 15-17, 1973, (reference from UNIX(tm) Time-Sharing System: Unix Programmers Manual, 7th edition, vol 2, Murray Hill, f/n pg 20). See also Ritchie's account of the creation of C by early 1973 in "The Development of the C Language," ACM, presented at Second History of Programming Languages conference, Cambridge, Mass, April 1993, pg. 1) Describing this important achievement by Bell Labs researchers, Mohr writes, "the integral portability of the system developed by Research proved adequate to make UNIX portable over a wide range of hardware."


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