The Unix Epoch begins with the defined beginning of Unix time occurring at 00:00:00 January 1rst 1970.
- Late 1960s: Unix was initially developed at AT&T Bell Labs by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, Joe Ossanna, Brian Kernighan, and collaborators. Early versions used a different epoch date (November 17, 1971).
- Early 1970s: The epoch’s start date and time was set to January 1, 1970, likely sometime between 1971 and 1973. There’s no precise record of the exact date this change occurred or the explicit reasoning.
- 1971: The first official version of Unix was released.
- Internal Circulation (1971): The first edition of the Unix Programmer’s Manual was published internally at Bell Labs on November 3, 1971. This marked the first formal documentation of Unix, but it wasn’t a public release.
- 1971–1973: Limited Distribution, Throughout the early 1970s, Unix was shared with a few universities and research institutions, but it wasn’t widely available.
- 1973: Public Presentation, Unix was first presented to the wider world at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1973. This generated interest outside Bell Labs.
- Late 1970s: Licensing, AT&T (Bell Labs’ parent company), started licensing Unix to universities and companies in the late 1970s, with an initial license similar to the later developments of the GNU General Public License (GPL), a widely used copyleft license, or even the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licenses.
- The initial Unix license for academia and corporations helped establish aspects of Compute Culture including:
- Openness and Collaboration: The relatively permissive nature of early Unix licenses, even with their limitations, fostered a culture of openness and collaboration.
- Forking and Diversification: The ability to modify and redistribute Unix led to the creation of various Unix versions and derivatives (like BSD and System V).
- Foundation for Open Source: The principles of sharing and modification embedded in early Unix licenses laid the groundwork for the later open-source movement. Concepts like copyleft and permissive licenses like the BSD license drew inspiration from these early practices.
- Reduced Costs: The availability of Unix source code and the ability to modify it reduced development costs for many including academia, corporations, and military organizations. This made Unix a more affordable option compared to proprietary systems, especially for academic and military-industrial research institutions.
- Influence on Commercial Software: Even commercial Unix vendors like Sun Microsystems were eventually influenced by the open and collaborative ethos of the Unix community. They often released parts of their code under open-source licenses or adopted more flexible licensing terms.
- Compute powers and Decentralized Networks, ie Internet: Unix and its derivatives continue to be at the core of many technologies today from individual machines to distributed systems worldwide. For instance, the open nature of Unix fostered interoperability and collaboration, which were essential for Internet’s growth.
The Unix Epoch — jonCates with Alphabet (Google) AI, Gemini Advanced 1.5 Pro, an open education resource for glitch.school Media Art Hystories, January 1rst 2025
