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A repository of Unix history and evolution

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Abstract

The history and evolution of the Unix operating system is made available as a revision management repository, covering the period from its inception in 1972 as a five thousand line kernel, to 2016 as a widely-used 27 million line system. The 1.1gb repository contains 496 thousand commits and 2,523 branch merges. The repository employs the commonly used Git version control system for its storage, and is hosted on the popular GitHub archive. It has been created by synthesizing with custom software 24 snapshots of systems developed at Bell Labs, the University of California at Berkeley, and the 386bsd team, two legacy repositories, and the modern repository of the open source Freebsd system. In total, 973 individual contributors are identified, the early ones through primary research. The data set can be used for empirical research in software engineering, information systems, and software archaeology.

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo.

  2. Updates may add or modify material. To ensure replicability the repository’s users are encouraged to fork it on GitHub or archive it.

  3. https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux.

  4. The dates provided here are given by Salus (1994, p. 43).

  5. http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/1972_stuff/.

  6. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make.

  7. https://www.mckusick.com/csrg/.

  8. http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree.

  9. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/64025/who-are-these-bsd-unix-contributors.

  10. ftp://ftp.tuhs.org.ua/PDP-11/Tools/Tapes/newoldar.c.

  11. https://github.com/jonathangray/csrg-git-patches/.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks the many individuals who contributed, directly or indirectly, to the effort. John Cowan, Brian W. Kernighan, Larry McVoy, Doug McIlroy, Jeremy C. Reed, Aharon Robbins, and Marc Rochkind helped with Bell Labs login identifiers. Clem Cole, John Cowan, Era Eriksson, Mary Ann Horton, Warner Losh, Kirk McKusick, Jeremy C. Reed, Ingo Schwarze, Anatole Shaw, and Norman Wilson helped with bsd login identifiers and code authorship information. The historical and current material used in the repository was made available thanks to efforts by the Free bsd Project, Lynne Greer Jolitz, William F. Jolitz, Kirk McKusick, and the Unix Heritage Society. The early Unix editions were released under an bsd-style license thanks to the efforts of Bill Broderick, Paul Hatch, Dion L. Johnson II, Ransom Love, and Warren Toomey. The bsd sccs import code is based on work by H. Merijn Brand and Jonathan Gray. The newoldar program is a result of work by Brandon Creighton and Dan Frasnelli. The First Research Edition Unix was restored by Johan Beiser, Tim Bradshaw, Brantley Coile, Christian David, Alex Garbutt, Hellwig Geisse, Cyrille Lefevre, Ralph Logan, James Markevitch, Doug Merritt, Tim Newsham, Brad Parker, and Warren Toomey.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management Science and Technology, Athens University of Economics and Business, Patision 76, 104 34, Athens, Greece

    Diomidis Spinellis

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  1. Diomidis Spinellis
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Correspondence to Diomidis Spinellis.

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Communicated by: Romain Robbes, Martin Pinzger and Yasutaka Kamei

The work has been partially funded by the Research Centre of the Athens University of Economics and Business, under the Original Scientific Publications framework (project code EP-2279-01) and supported by computational time granted from the Greek Research & Technology Network (grnet) in the National hpc facility — aris — under project id pa003005-cdolpot.

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Spinellis, D. A repository of Unix history and evolution. Empir Software Eng 22, 1372–1404 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9445-5

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