1. Unix
[In the authors' words, “A weak pun on Multics”; very
early on it was “UNICS”] (also “UNIX”) An
interactive timesharing system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell
Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could play games on his
scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is considered a
co-author of the system. The turning point in Unix's history came when it
was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972—1974, making it
the first source-portable OS. Unix subsequently underwent mutations and
expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely
flexible and developer-friendly environment. By 1991, Unix had become the
most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world
— and since 1996 the variant called Linux has
been at the cutting edge of the open source
movement. Many people consider the success of Unix the most important
victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but see Unix
weenie and Unix conspiracy for an
opposing point of view). See Version 7,
BSD, Linux.Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately
‘UNIX’ or ‘Unix’; both forms are common, and used
interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the ‘UNIX’ spelling
originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper The UNIX Time-Sharing
System because “we had a new typesetter and
troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated
by being able to produce small caps.” Later, dmr tried to get the
spelling changed to ‘Unix’ in a couple of Bell Labs papers, on
the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his
words) “wimped out” on the issue. So, while the trademark
today is ‘UNIX’, both capitalizations are grounded in ancient
usage; the Jargon File uses ‘Unix’ in deference to dmr's
wishes.
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Definitions of Unix 
