Unix celebrates its 40th birthday in a couple of months. Developers should really celebrate by having hundreds of different flavours of birthday cake.

The software was penned by Ken Thompson in August 1969. Thompson was a programmer at Bell Laboratories, who knocked it out while his wife and kid were away for a bit. It took him a week. Unix was first used on a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer which was fairly wimpy considering where the beast was going to end up. In 1971 it was ported to the PDP-11 minicomputer. Text-formatting and text-editing programs were added, and it was rolled out to a few typists in the Bell Labs Patent department.

Thompson rewrote Unix in C which made it a lot more portable across computing environments and around then the name Unics was coined. Later they mis-spelled it as Unix. In 1974 the system was praised to the skies by the Association for Computing Machinery and everyone wanted it. The software could be run on smaller computers and had a pipe feature which allowed the output of data from one program to another which was important for the development of Unix variants such as Linux, DOS and Windows. It was simple and easily modified and the source code was free.

AT&T work up and realised that it had a money spinner on its hands and from 1979, with the release of Version 7, Unix licenses prohibited universities from using the Unix source code for study in their courses. So the computer experts came up with Minix which was based on an earlier version of Unix. Minux would eventually morph into Linux.

Bill Joy at Berkeley made a second major branch of Unix, called Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix. In March 1978, Joy sent out copies of
1BSD, priced at $50. And thus were born the Unix wars. Software developers started to tinker with the Unix source code and while Unix was used, it was forked off so many times it was possible to get a bit lost.

This enabled the entry of Microsoft into the market which hand been Unix's turf. Windows NT took out huge chunks of Unix business at a stroke. The Unix industry was panicked into some standardisation but it came too late. Instead people which would have gone to pure Unix played around with its love child, Linux.

It seems that the reason why Unix is not as popular as it was is because of the same reason it was popular in the first place. It is because with
all its flavours it lost portability, which Linux and Windows do have. However the system is not going away. Linux does not have Unix's long history of development, stress testing or reliability. This makes it still the OS of choice for many companies.