1956 bell labs is forbidden to enter the computer buisness. unix could not be a product. ken thompson began answering requests by shipping out tapes and disks, each accompanied by a note signed "Love, Ken"

1970 Unix was officially named and ran on the PDP - 11/20 computer.

1971 Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson write the first man pages (short for manual pages) to document UNIX command line applications, and they have become a very useful tool ever since. Today almost every UNIX command line application comes with a man page - in fact, a lack of man pages is seen as a sign of low quality by UNIX users. All man pages are structured in a layout that is optimized for viewing on any simple ASCII text display, and includes a description of an application's function, examples of how to use it, and a list of related commands or functions in addition to several other aspects.

1971 Nov. Ken Tompson and Dennis Ritchie published "Unix Programmer's Manual 1st ED.

1971 The Unix Programmers Manual was published; commands were documented in the "man page" format that is still used today.

1971 The UNIX's Programmer's Manual is published, giving information about commands, usage, and bugs.

1972 The language of Unix was rewritten into the C programming language. This big leap from an assembly language to C programming language gave great deal of advantage which results in more portable software.

1973 First version written in C. Introduced groups, grep, and printf at that time. And this is the fourth version of Unix.

1973 "Pipe" is added to Unix.

1973 Unix V3 is released which incorporated pipe functionality, a concept created and pushed for implementation by Douglas McIlroy.

1974 Bill Joy developed an editor called em ("editor for mortals") due to his frustrations with ed. It featured two error messages to ed's one.

1974 Communications of the ACM is published by Ritchie and Thompson. This paper was the first to publicize the design of Unix and began to raise interest in the system.

1975 Known as "Version 6," this is the first to be widely available outside of Bell Labs. The first BSD version (1.x) was derived from V6.

1975 "Pipes" are added to UNIX, allowing programs to be coupled to one another, such that the output of one program is fed to another program as input, and the output of that program in turn can be fed to another program and so on, forming "pipelines".

1975 The Bourne Shell (sh), designed to improve on the Thompson shell, is introduced to Unix and becomes the the default shell for Unix Version 7.

1975 UNIX Time-Sharing System Sixth Edition (V6), first version of the Unix Operating System to see wide release outside Bell Labs.

1975 UNIX version six is released, and for the first time UNIX is distributed widely outside of Bell Labs.

1975 UNix with Version 6 became widely known out side of Bell Labs. The first BSD version was developed based on V6.

1976 John Lion produced "Lions Book" which contains a commentary on the complete source code of the 6th Edition Unix kernel.

1976 Unix was introduced in Japan.

1977 An early version of Unix called PWB 1.0 (Programmer's workbench) was released.

1977 Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a project developed at UC Berkeley and upon which OS X is loosely based, is first released.

1977 Bill Joy, a graduate student makes the first Berkeley Software Distribution version of UNIX. The first BSD was not a complete operating system. It was an add-on to Version 6 UNIX

1977 Bill Joy finishes creating vi by adding a full-screen visual mode.

1977 Originally just lecture notes, John Lions publishes "A Commentary on the Unix Operating System" and was heavily used in computer science courses.

1980 Microsoft introduces Xenix, a version of the Unix operating for various platforms licensed by Microsoft.

1980 Microsoft releases Xenix, an iteration of UNIX, licensed from AT&T. As measured by the number of systems with Xenix installed, it was the most popular form of UNIX in the late 1980's.

1980 Microsoft release Xenix, their version of Linux. Xenix went on to be the most popular "flavor" of Unix during the late 80's.

1980 When unix for microcomputers became commercially available

1980 Xenix was introduced by Microsoft. 4BSD were also introduced after the release of 3BSD in 1979.

1981 AT&T begins selling UNIX Version III, many believed AT&T was making Unix into a commercial product since Licensees had the new ability to sell binary sublicenses. The sublicenses cost about $100.

1982 The first public edition is made public outside of Bell Laboratories. System III

1983 Richard Stallman announced the GNU project, an ambitious effort to create a free software Unix-like system

1983 The GNU project was announced, an effort to create an effectively open-source Unix system for the general public.

1983 The U.S. Dept. of Justice settled a lawsuit against AT&T, the company where the creators of Unix developed the platform, which allowed AT&T to commercialize Unix System V. Because that commercialization of the product was cumbersome, developers began to release later versions for free.

1983 UNIX System Development Lab is formed by the merging of Computer Research Group, UNIX System Group, and a third group.

1983 Unix System V was released by AT&T with four major versions.

1984 the Open Group for Unix Systems was formed by five european unix system manufacturers concerned about being squeezed out of the marketplace by the proprietary systems of larger corporations. by conforming to the standards that the group proposed, the portfolio of applications that could be used on a given unix system was increased.

1984 X/Open is formed, develops the concept of "open systems," and chooses UNIX to be the base platform for these systems.

1985 IBM offers its own Unix on their platform: IX/370, which as developed by Interactive System Corps and designed to compete against Amdahl Corp's UTS.

1985 In 1982 a Brazilian research team tried to license UNIX from AT&T and when AT&T refused, they began work on their alternative: “Plurix”. It was up and running in 1985.

1986 AIX(Advanced Ineractive eXecutive- a closed source unix OS) was created by IBM and used ony many platforms.

1986 IBM debuts its Unix like operating system Advanced Interactive eXecutive (AIX).

1986 IBM releases their own version of Unix, dubbed AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) on the IBM 6150 RISC workstation.

1986 The magazine "Computerworld" writes about how Unix is now becoming associated with corporate data and commerical efforts, rather than only academic and technical areas.

1987 to make the market more central, AT&T announced a partnership with Sun Microsystems; the leading program within Berkley whom created a leading flavor of Unix.

1987 UNIX passes 750,000 installations around the world.

1988 AT&T starts what is referred to as "Unix Wars", collaborating with SCO and Sun Microsystems to create a competing version of Unix.

1988 The "Unix Wars" took place. In response to the AT&T/Sun partnership, rival Unix vendors including DEC, HP and IBM form the Open Software Foundation to develop open Unix standards.

1988 Unix vendors develop open Unix standards. To implement the open Unix standards, companies such as IBM, HP and DEC formed the Open Software Foundation while their rival AT&T/Sun formed their own standards which is called Unix International.

1989 Bourne-again shell (bash), written by Brian Fox is released as a free replacement of the Bourne Shell.

1989 Chet Ramey joined the original writer of bash in helping with bug fixing   and enhancements, he is now the official maintainer of bash.

1989 UNIX System V Release 4 ships, unifying SYstem V, BSD and Xenix. Installed base 1.2 million.

1989 – Work begins on 386BSD.  Although originally closed off, in 1992 it went open source

1991 Majority of UNIX is owed by AT&T at this time and Linux starts development.

1991 UNIX System Laboratories (USL) becomes a public company that was created and controlled by the AT&T Corporation. Along with the formation of the company, a version of the UNIX OS called 'Solaris 1.0' is created.

1992 A free BSD clone called 386BSD is released, eventually leading to the development of NetBSD and FreeBSD

1992 In 1992, USL released a new version of UNIX called Destiny (officially, System V Release 4.2).

1992 Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, the first CD distributed version of linux is released.

1993 AT&T sold its Unix business to Novell, who sold it to Santa Cruz Operation just two years later.

1993 Berkeley released 4.4BSD. Then on June 16 USL is acquired.

1993 FreeBSD first released, a free open-source UNIX-like OS that is still widely used today.

1993 Ian Murdock releases the first version of the Debian Linux Release, a free and open operating system.

1993 Novell sells the rights to the Unix System V source to X/Open Company

1993 Slackware (A linux distribution) was created by Patrick Volkerding. It was originally based on Softlanding Linux System which was founded by Peter MacDonald in May 1992.

1994 Linux Kernel Version 1.0 was release, this version supported single processor i386 based computer systems. In 3 years the lines of code in kernel expanded to be over 176,250.

1994 Red Hat Linux is introduced, serving as a base for numerous distributions to come.

1994 Red Hat was announced and made available on CD-ROM.  It was announced by its co-founder Marc Ewing

1994 version 1.0 was released. A kernal the size of 1 mb now roamed the earth.

1995 Novell sold its Unix buisness to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), shortly after buying the rights from AT&T.

1995 The Santa Cruz Operation purchased the rights to continue developing UNIX, and support the existing licenses from Novell

1996 A penguin became the Linux mascot because Linus Torvalds was bitten by a penguin. His Name is Tux which comes from "Torvalds Unix".

1996 A penguin was chosen as the mascot for Linux due to the fact that Torvalds was bitten by one in Australia. The name Tux was chosen for him from 'T'orvalds 'U'ni'X'.

1996 In August 1996, Apple had bought Next by bringing Steve Jobs back on board and use Unix-based NeXTSTEP as its new operating system.

1996 Linus Torvald got bit by a penguin while he was visiting a zoo. Linus (jokingly) claims that he was infected with penguinitis and this in turn was the inspiration for Tux, the penguin mascot of Linux.

1996 Open Group is formed as a result of a merger between OSF and X(Open).

1997 The Open Group introduces Ver. 2 of Single UNIX Specification, which includes support for realtime, threads and 64-bit (and larger) processors. It was made available on the web for free.

1997 The Open Group releases the second version of the Single Unix Specification.

1997 Titanic, the all-time greatest blockbuster, was the first major filmed to be produced using Linux

1999 30 years have passed since Unix's release.

1999 Apple begins to make the switch to a Unix based operating system with the release of Mac OS X Server 1.0.

1999 On the same CPU structure, Unix systems operation owns abundant binary compatibility.

1999 The 30th anniversary of the UNIX system. Second LinuxWorld conference held in New York City.

1999 The UNIX system celebrates its 30th anniversary. Linux 2.2 kernel was released.  The first ever LinuxWorld conferences were held this year.

1999 The UNIX system reached its 30th anniversary, Linux 2.2 kernel was released, and the Open Group and the IEEE develop a revision of POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification.

1999 The UNIX system reaches its 30th anniversary. Linux 2.2 kernel released. First LinuxWorld conferences.

1999 The UNIX system reaches its 30th anniversary. Linux 2.2 kernel released. First LinuxWorld conferences. The Open Group and the IEEE commence joint development of a revision to POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification.

1999 The Unix system reaches its 30th anniversary. The Open Group and the IEEEcommence joint development of a revision to POSIX and the Single Unix Specification. First LinuxWorld conferences.

2000 Apple released Darwin, an open source Unix based operating system, that became the core of the OS X operating system.

2000 Apple releases an open source Unix-like operating system called Darwin, which later goes on to form a good portion of OS X (released 2001). The kernel was derived from the Mach 3 kernel, with influences from BSD.

2000 Apple releases Darwin, a NeXTSTEP variant which they later adapted into OS X and iOS.

2000 Apple releases Darwin, an open-source UNIX OS that still forms the backbone of OSX and iOS today.

2000 SCO sells UNIX buisness to Caldera Systems, who then change their name to The SCO Group.

2000 Unix's popularity grew when Apple released it's new version of the Mac OS, which was a Unix-based operating system, called Darwin.

2001 Apple�s operating system finally became Unix based on desktops. Went from Mac OS to OS X.

2001 The first consumer version of Apple's Unix 03 compliant operating system is released. OS X is one of six Unix 03 compliant operating systems.

2002 Single UNIX Specification (SUS) v3 is released.

2002 UK based paper, The Register, estimates that Microsoft had spent approximately 421 million dollars to combat the spread of Linux

2003 Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) began to execute legal action against many different users and vendors of Linux (Another computer system is based on Unix System platform), and SCO announced that every version of Linux must contain the copyrighted Unix code, and this copyrighted unix code should be owned by SCO Group (Caldera System).

2003 SCO Group files a lawsuit against IBM claiming that due to alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses devauled SCO's version of UNIX.

2003 Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification becomes an international standard

2004 First version of Ubuntu is released

2004 The first release of Ubuntu is released.

2004 Ubuntu is first released and will later go on to be used in the UA Computer Science labs.

2004 Ubuntu's first release happens on October 20th.

2005 Sun Microsystems released the bulk of its SOlaris system code into an open source project called OpenSolaris which includes the ZFS file system.

2005 Sun Microsystems released the Solaris system code in an open source project called OpenSolaris. Solaris is based on the Unix System V 4th release.

2007 Apple Mac OS X certified to UNIX 03.

2009 The first build of The Amnesia Incoginito Live System (Tails), a Unix distribution built for privacy that uses Tor for all internet connections, is released.

2010 Apple reported that 50 million desktops that are running certified UNIX systems. This number represents a continuing uptrend.  Retyped off of what is quoted here: http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html

2010 Apple reports record number of 50 million desktops that are certified Unix systems.

2010 Apple reports they have sold over 50 million computers.  Every single one of those computers is a certified unix system used everyday by the average consumer.

2010 Apple says there are 50 million+ of their desktops sold, which are UNIX systems.

2014 ShellShock bug in bash was discovered. This bug caused bash to execute commands when they were concatenated to functions that were stored inside variables. The bug was patched quickly but many companies suffered DDoS attacks and other vulnerabilities.

2015 I installed Linux on my laptop :)

2015 Stephen Ramirez is slaving over his computer attempting to solve these programming problems