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Bell Labs in the period 1968-1969 was involved in the Multics project which was supposed to provide a convenient interactive computing service to the entire community. This OS failed because Multics could not support many users at an exorbitant cost.

During 1969 an alternative was being worked on, and in 1970 this alternative was given the name of UNIX, a pun on the name Multics since UNIX can support multiple users and multiple processes. The name was coined by Brian Kernighan.


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by Zhen-Xjell See Profile edited by hacheelle See Profile
last modified: 2001-06-20 16:03:04