It all started in 1969 when two Bell Labs computer scientists were looking for a new research project. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie had spent the last half of the decade working on an experimental time-sharing operating system for mainframes called Multics as part of joint research group with General Electric and MIT. The Multics project was high on ambition but fraught with problems leading AT&T to withdraw from the effort. That left Thompson, Ritchie and several other Bell Labs researchers in search of a new problem to solve. They decided to take the best ideas from Multics and implement them on a smaller scale – specifically on a little-used PDP-7 minicomputer at Bell Labs. That summer Unix was born.

Unix made large-scale networking of diverse computing systems — and the Internet — practical. The Unix team went on to develop the C language, which brought an unprecedented combination of efficiency and expressiveness to programming. Both made computing more “ portable. ” Today, Linux, the most popular descendent of Unix, powers the vast majority of servers, and elements of Unix and Linux are found in most mobile devices. Meanwhile C++ remains one of the most widely used programming languages today. Unix may be a half-century old but its influence is only growing.