| Sumario: | Dennis Ritchie, who has worked at the Bell Labs since 1967, is revered as the inventor of C, and, with Ken Thompson, as the co-inventor of Unix. However, both projects were, in fact, intensely collaborative. Dr Thompson had written C's immediate predecessor, a language known as B. And though Dr Thompson was the first person to work on Unix, Dr Ritchie and others, including Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike and Doug McIlroy (who headed the research group), were fundamental to its development. All the key participants recall the genesis of Unix and C, and the environment at Bell Labs, as something of an idyll. The severe limitations of the computers of the day forced Dr Thompson and Dr Ritchie to be ruthlessly efficient in their designs. Of course, this was true of other operating systems and languages of the time, which have long since faded from use. What distinguished the Bell Labs team is that, from the beginning, they focused on doing things that had not been done before, and doing them with clarity. The later history of Unix is convoluted, and indeed has again become mired in court battles. Following its origins at Bell Labs, a competing version sprang up at the University of California, Berkeley, which first released its version of Unix in 1977, under the leadership of a graduate student named Bill Joy, who later went on to found Sun Microsystems. Ideological battles raged between adherents of the two versions of Unix through much of the 1980s. To an extent, this rivalry was stripped of relevance by an unexpected entrant. In 1991, an obscure university student in Finland, Linus Torvalds, announced a project to write a new, open-source clone of Unix from scratch-what has come to be known as Linux. Linux is also the true heir of the Unix tradition in the sense that its development process is collaborative.
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