History of Linux and Unix

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” – attributed to Mark Twain

Have you ever wondered how the name UNIX came about? Have you ever wondered why UNIX was developed in the first place? Why is it passwd instead of password? What the Hell does grep stand for anyway? Why are there around 40 commands that are two characters in length? Have you ever wondered WTF when it came to UNIX/Linux? Me too! And, over my years as a corporate trainer, I have assembled stories from students who were there when Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Steven Bourne (no relation to Jason), and all the others, were developing UNIX and the C Programming language at AT&T Bell Labs back in the 1970s. Students who would say things like, “Yeah, when I was in a class that Dennis Ritchie was teaching at Bell Labs, Dennis explained…”

Now, I cannot swear that all of these stories are true, but they do make for a good story, and they can at least help you get over some of the WTF moments encountered when dealing with UNIX and Linux.

Presented by Dan Bacus:
Dan Bacus started out in college learning C Programming on DEC ULTRIX back in 1986. He was a corporate trainer, teaching several versions of UNIX from 1992 to 2001, including: NCR SVR4, HP-UX, DG-UX, Sun OS, and Solaris. He has taught everything from how to log in, to how to analyze a kernel panic. He was an Adjunct Instructor at the Nashville campus of ITT Technical Institute from 2010 to 2016, teaching classes on Linux; Networking; Network Security; and Programming. He has held several positions involving UNIX/Linux administration, SAN administration, backups, and related technologies over the years, and he is currently employed at MEDHOST as a Sr. Storage Engineer where he is automating storage tasks via shell programming on RHEL.