CTE388H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Dennis Ritchie, Unix Philosophy, High-Level Programming Language
5 Jul 2017
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Document Summary
Ken thompson and dennis ritchie and others, are the creators of unix. Ritchie also created c at bell telephone labs. Has been ported to almost every hardware platform. Open source versions such as linux and bsd have become popular. These design ideas were new at the time unix was created. It was written in a high level language instead of assembly language so it was easier to port to other platforms. Other operating systems did this (multics, burroughs) but unix popularized it. The ideas which went into building it were useful and robust. They have demonstrated that they can be very powerful. Operating systems at the time often did not have hierarchical file systems. They divided disks into sections that had a fixed number of levels, often only one. Treating devices and some networking as files. Treating devices as files simplified access to them. It provided a uniform interface to printers, keyboards, disks, etc
