![]() Unix has a lot of things that a lot of people would say they wish weren't there." "An early hallmark of Unix was its simplicity," Korn says. The Unix pioneer confesses to a certain nostalgia for his early days with the operating system. "Hundreds of thousands of users have downloaded it already," Korn says. Like so many things associated with Unix at Bell Labs and AT&T, the open-source Uwin software has propagated far and wide. Microsoft wrote Windows NT to allow multiple operating systems to run on a Windows machine as subsystems, but before Korn wrote Uwin, a programmer couldn't mix Unix and Windows calls in one integrated application. Then, about 10 years ago, Korn wrote Uwin (Unix for Windows), a Posix-based interface for Windows that allows AT&T's Unix-based code to run on Windows computers. ![]() ![]() The result was a high-level programming language that became the de facto standard for Unix and Unix-like systems. Borrowing ideas from the original Unix shell written by Ken Thompson, the Bourne shell written by Steve Bourne at Bell Labs and the C shell written by Bill Joy at Berkeley, Korn added his own ideas and turned them into a more general scripting language. Looking for a better and easier-to-use Unix command language, Korn in the early 1980s wrote what was to become the ubiquitous Korn shell. Korn, an application software developer with a background in aerodynamics, was assigned to two of the "first real Unix projects at Bell Labs," he says - one to establish a centralized, mainframe-based database for internal systems, and the other to create a way to update electronic communication switches. Now an AT&T Fellow, Korn came to Bell Labs in 1976, just when Unix was beginning to move into the outside world in a serious way. Here's a brief look at three people, among thousands, who have made a difference in the Unix world. That's entirely fair, but as with most important technologies, it's the people who follow the pioneers who often make the difference between a fabulous lab prototype and a technology that really transforms the landscape. Programmers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are most often credited with the invention of Unix at Bell Labs in 1969 and the early 1970s. ![]()
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