Please provide me a detailed history of Unix/SCO-Unix Thanks & best regards Rashid Ali Khan

This the question I tried to get answered; Below is the answer I found on the greater net. Unix Pronounced yoo-niks, a popular multi-user, multitasking operating system developed at Bell Labs in the early 1970s. Created by just a handful of programmers, UNIX was designed to be a small, flexible system used exclusively by programmers. Although it has matured considerably over the years, UNIX still betrays its origins by its cryptic command names and its general lack of user-friendliness. This is changing, however, with graphical user interfaces such as MOTIF. UNIX was one of the first operating systems to be written in a high-level programming language, namely C. This meant that it could installed on virtually any computer for which a C compiler existed. This natural portability combined with its low price made it a popular choice among universities. (It was inexpensive because antitrust regulations prohibited Bell Labs from marketing it as a full-scale product.) Bell Labs distributed the operating system in its source language form, so anyone who obtained a copy could modify and customize it for his own purposes. By the end of the 1970s, dozens of different versions of UNIX were running at various sites. After its breakup in 1982, AT&T began to market UNIX in earnest. It also began the long and difficult process of defining a standard version of UNIX. To date, there are two main dialects of UNIX; one produced by AT&T known as System V and one developed at Berkeley University and known as BSD4.x, x being a number from 1 to 3. Due to its portability, flexibility, and power, UNIX has become the leading operating system for workstations. Historically, it has been less popular in the personal computer market, but the emergence of a new version called Linux is revitalizing UNIX across all platforms.

A History of Unix 1965 Multics project begun as joint venture of AT&T, MIT, and GE to create a new operating system for the GE computer. 1969 AT&T Bell Labs researchers Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, J. F. Ossanna, and R. H. Canaday create a prototype file management system as an alternative to MULTICS. Commercial systems at the time were written entirely in assembly language. One of the goals of unix is to have a small kernel written in assembler, and the rest in a high-level language. Unix also has a hierarchical file system and a collection of utility programs. 1970 Jan 1 00:00:00 GMT 1970 - The Unix epoch, the point from which unix clocks measure time. Brian Kernighan coins the name unics (UNiplexed Information and Computing System) Unix development increases with the acquisition of a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) PDP-11, a state-of-the-art $65,000 computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM and 512 kilobytes of disk space. Thompson develops B as an alternative to Fortran and BCPL. 1971 1st Unix version, V1, used only within Bell Labs. Needing to justify the cost of development, Unix is used (with the assembly-langfuage-coded troff) in the Bell Labs patent department as a one of the first word-processing programs. B is improved upon and its successor is named C. 1972 M. D. McIlroy introduces the novel idea of 'pipes'. : June - V2 : 10 Unix installations. 1973 February - V3 - 16 Unix installations. November - V4 is rewritten in C, easing the portability of Unix 1974 S. R. Bourne develops the Bourne Shell (/bin/sh, indicated with a '$') June - V5 Estimated 50 Unix installations. 1975 AT&T leases V6 to universities at low cost, making Unix use widespread. Thompson spends year at UC Berkeley, leads development of a BSD variant of Unix. UC Berkeley grad student Bill Joy (who later starts Sun Microsystems) develops the C-shell (/bin/csh, indicated with a '%') and the vi text editor. TENEX-style C-shell developed (/bin/tcsh) (date?) David Korn from AT&T develops the Korn shell (/bin/ksh) (date?) 1976 Wanting a free alternative to ksh, GNU advocates develop bash (Bourne-again shell). (date?) 1977 1BSD released Tom Duff and Byron Rakitzis develop the rc shell. (date?) 1978 Students at UC Berkeley, known as "Berkeley Software Distribution", develop their own variant of Unix, called BSD. 2BSD released, 75 copies distributed. 600 Unix installations worldwide. 1979 Private companies begin porting commercial versions of Unix. BSD releases 3BSD. AT&T releases the 40KB-kernel V7 The system calls of V7: _exit, access, acct, alarm, brk, chdir, chmod, chown, chroot, close, creat, dup, dup2, exec*, exit, fork, fstat, ftime, getegid, geteuid, getgid, getpid, getuid, gtty, indir, ioctl, kill, link, lock, lseek, mknod, mount, mpxcall, nice, open, pause, phys, pipe, pkoff, pkon, profil, ptrace, read, sbrk, setgid, setuid, signal, stat, stime, stty, sync, tell, time, times, umask, umount, unlink, utime, wait, write. 1980 Microsoft releases Xenix, which is the first attempt to bring Unix to desktop computers. October - BSD releases 4.0BSD 1982 AT&T releases their first commercial version of Unix, System III 1983 Computer Research Group (CRG), UNIX System Group (USG), and Programmer's WorkBench (PWB) merge to become UNIX System Development Lab. AT&T releases System V, incorporating Xenix and other variants. BSD releases 4.2BSD which includes complete implementation of TCP/IP networking protocols, including telnet and ftp. SVID, the System 5 Interface Definition, is released in an effort to standardize the Unix flavors as much as possible. 1984 Estimated 100,000 Unix installations worldwide. U.S. government charges AT&T with monopolistic practices and AT&T is forced to divest its interests. AT&T releases SVR2, incorporating many features from 4.2BSD X/Open consortium of vendors founded, eventually known as The Open Group, gets UNIX trademark. Richard Stallman develops GNU (GNU's Not UNIX) as a free Unix clone. 1985 February - AT&T releases V8 Paul Falstad develops zsh. (date?) 1986 September - AT&T releases V9 DEC, which had been supporting VAX/VMS, is forced to ackowledge and support Unix as an inexpensive alternative. Rc shell upgraded to es. (date?) 1987 Estimated 100,000 Unix installations worldwide. 1988 Unix International (UI) and Open Software Foundation (OSF) are formed. SVR4 relases as a combo of System V, BSD, and SunOS. 1989 October - AT&T releases V10, the final version. 1991 Unix Systems Laboratory (USL) spun off as a separate company, majority-owned by AT&T. OSF releases OSF/1. Linus Torvalds releases Linux kernel (Linus's Minix, pronounced 'lin-ux') 1992 July 14 - William and Lynne Jolitz release 386BSD as open source, eventually evolving into NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. 1993 4.4BSD released as final Berkely release. June 16 - Novell buys USL from AT&T. 1994 Torvalds and many others relase version 1.0 of the Linux kernel. Used with Stallman's GNU command-set, users around the world have access to a free Unix variant known as GNU/Linux, or just Linux. 1995 Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) buys USL from Novell June - 4.4BSD Lite Release 2 the final distribution. 1996 OSF and X/Open merge to become The Open Group. 1997 The Open Group releases Single UNIX Specification, Version 2 1998 20 million Unix installations worldwide. 1999 After years of growing hype about Linux, and Microsoft staunchly refusing to take part in the open source movement, many companies feel compelled to choose between developing software for Unix or for Windows NT Note: http://www.matchstick.com/unix/history.html.

According to the Jargon File vers. 4.2: Unix: /yoo'niks/ n. [In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early on it was `UNICS'] (also `UNIX') An interactive time-sharing system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could play games on his scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is considered a co-author of the system. The turning point in Unix's history came when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972-1974, making it the first source-portable OS. Unix subsequently underwent mutations and expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely flexible and developer-friendly environment. By 1991, Unix had become the most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world. Many people consider this the most important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition