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A History of UNIX
development of pipes, which gave programmers the ability to string together a number of processes for a specific output. Doug McIlroy then a department head in the Computing Science Research Center is credited for the concept of pipes at Bell Labs and Thompson gets the credit for actually doing it. As technically neat as this accomplishment was when Thompson created pipes, he also put something else into UNIX a philosophy. This philosophy was write programs that do one thing and do it well, write programs to work together and write programs that handle text streams. While input/output direction predates pipes, the development of pipes led to the concept of tools software.
In 1976-77, Ken Thompson took a six-month sabbatical from Bell Labs to teach as a visiting professor at the Computer Science Department at the University of California-Berkeley (UCB). What he taught, was the UNIX system. While there he also developed much of what eventually became Version 6. The system was an instant hit and the word spread quickly throughout the academic community. When Thompson returned to Bell Labs students and professors at Berkeley continued to enhance UNIX. Eventually, many of these enhancements were incorporated into what became known as Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Version 4.2. UNIX had been distributed via academic licenses, which were relatively inexpensive, and government and commercial licenses from about 1975. UCB became important in spreading the word about UNIX when it established a Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), originally under the direction of Robert Fabry. The CSRG did much of the real work in making the TCP/IP protocols, which is the foundation of the Internet. The expansion of UNIX into academic environments also was aided by the fact that the Digital VAX machine was at a price that academic departments could afford. In addition UNIX helped play a key role in the early days of the Internet because most of the VAX computers supporting it ran on UNIX.