This repository tracks the changes to the "Unix Timesharing System" paper written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. This was the paper, published in the Communications of the ACM in 1974, which introduced UNIX to the general public.
There are five known versions of this paper:
- A draft of this paper, written in mid-1971 by Dennis Ritchie, available at [https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero-Threshold_OCR.pdf].
- The presentation of the paper made by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson in 1973 at the fourth Symposium on Operating System Principles. It appears that only the abstract of the presentation was published.
- The version of the paper as it appeared in 1974 in the Communications of the ACM.
- The version of the paper made available in the 6th Edition of UNIX, available at [https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/doc/unix].
- The version of the paper published in 1978 in the Bell System Technical Journal.
There may also be a version of the paper from around 1972 which is still in the Nokia Bell Labs archives. This has yet to be confirmed.
I have separated each of the sections of the paper into several Markdown files; this makes it easier for the changes in each version to be compared.
The draft of the paper, written by Dennis Ritchie in mid-1971, has these sections:
- Introduction
- Hardware
- The File System
- Implementation of the File System
- The Shell
- Census of Special Files
- Traps
- Some Commands
- Appendix 1: System Calls
- Appendix 2: as, db, ed, tap