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Unix /yoo'niks/ n.
[In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early on it was `UNICS'] (also `UNIX') An interactive time-sharing system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could play games on his scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is considered a co-author of the system. The turning point in Unix's history came when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972-1974, making it the first source-portable OS. Unix subsequently underwent mutations and expansions at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely flexible and developer-friendly environment. By 1991, Unix had become the most widely used multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world - and since 1996 the variiant called [Linux] has been at the cutting edge of the [open source] movement. Many people consider the success of Unix the most important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but see [Unix weenie] and [Unix conspiracy] for an opposing point of view). See [Version 7], [BSD], [USG Unix], [Linux].