In 1965, Bell Telephone Laboratories joined an effort with the General Electric Company and Project MAC of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a new operating system called Multics. 

The goals of the Multics system were to provide simultaneous computer access to a large community of users, to supply ample computation power and data storage, and to allow users to share their data easily, if desired. 

In an attempt to improve their programming environment, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others sketched a paper design of a file system that later evolved into an early version of the UNIX file system. 

Thompson wrote programs that simulated the behavior of the proposed file system and of programs in a demand-paging environment, and he even encoded a simple kernel for the GE 645 computer. 

Several reasons have been suggested for the popularity and success of the UNIX system.

• The system is written in a high-level language, making it easy to read, understand, change, and move to other machines.
• It has a simple user interface that has the power to provide the services that users want.
• It provides primitives that permit complex programs to be built from simpler programs.
• It uses a hierarchical file system that allows easy maintenance and efficient implementation.
• It uses a consistent format for files, the byte stream, making application programs easier to write.
• It provides a simple, consistent interface to peripheral devices.
• It is a multi-user, multiprocess system; each user can execute several processes simultaneously.
• It hides the machine architecture from the user, making it easier to write programs that run on different hardware implementations.

See Also
Programming Learning Session #1
Programming Learning Session #2

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