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→A Brief History of Operating Systems
* Before the mid-1960s: A number of different manufacturers produced various computers for business. Since these machines were expensive, and because there were many different manufacturers, a relatively small number of machines of each model were produced. Very little was standardized, and data was rarely interchanged between computers. Consequently, there were many different operating systems, each with a fairly small market.
* 1964-1964 /1965 - MIT and partners begin the Multics Project. This project introduced many concepts that became common in later operating systems, including a heirarcical filesystem, multitasking, and interactive operation. This project continued through 2000. However, Multics was a fairly resource-intensive operating system.
* 1969 - Bell Labs decided to end their participation in the Multics project. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, Bell Labs employees who were familiar with the Multics project, decided to implement some of its features in a much lighter-weight operating system, which they called Unix. Unix was rewritten in the C language, and could be fairly easily ported to other types of computers.
* 1970s - Unix continued to grow in popularity. Many computer vendors licensed it and adapted it to work with their computers; some of these variants included Xenix (Microsoft), AIX (IBM), Ultrix (Digital Equipment Corporation), HP/UX (HP), and many others.
