Beginning of Essay
In the late 1960s a combined project between researchers at MIT, Bell Labs and General Electric led to the design of a third generation of computer operating system known as MULTICS (MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service). It was envisaged as a computer u ....

Middle of Essay
.... stripped down, single user version of MULTICS but Thompson actually got the system to work and one of his colleagues jokingly called it UNICS (UNiplexed Information and Computing Service). The name stuck but the spelling was later changed to UNIX. Soon Thompson was joined on the project by Dennis Richie and later by his entire department. UNIX was moved from the now obsolete PDP-7 to the much more modern PDP-11/20 and then later to the PDP-11/45 and PDP-11/70. These two latter computers had large memories as well as memory protection hardware, making it possible to support multiple users at the same time. Thompson then decided to rewrite UNIX in a hi ....