Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

The Free Software Foundation has released Happy Birthday to GNU to celebrate the silver anniversary of the operating system. The film, presented by actor/comedian Stephen Fry, offers a basic history ...

Most consumers can, with a little effort, name two desktop and laptop operating systems: Microsoft's Windows and Apple's macOS. Few have ever considered any of the open-source alternatives found under ...

Would you believe that almost all of the technology you use today is here because of a misbehaving printer? Believe it. In the early 1980s, an MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory programmer named ...

If you use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, ...