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1 entry of 164 involving Ken Thompson

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1960-1969 The 1960s

A lunar landing program helps set Unix in motion

Ken Thompson's Space Travel, a program for flying a craft among the planets and setting it down on them, moved with him to a disused PDP-7 at Bell Labs, where the work of supporting it ran alongside the beginnings of Unix.

Key facts and significance Hide details
Region
North America
Period
The 1960s

Why it matters

One of the clearest cases of play driving infrastructure. The routines and file handling written to keep a space simulation running on a spare computer belong to the earliest history of an operating system whose descendants now sit under servers, phones, consoles and most of the internet.

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