Unix operating system
Thomas Narten, Mark S. Burgess · Encyclopedia of Computer Science · 2003
Unix is a general-purpose time-sharing system developed in the early 1970s at Bell Laboratories by ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Almost three decades later, Unix stands as one of the most influential systems in computing history, and its popularity continues to grow. It has been ported to dozens of hardware platforms, and nearly every major vendor supports a product line based on Unix. In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie received the ACM Turing Award (q.v.) for their contributions to the computing field.