Early Unix History
The paper (linked below) was written by Dennis Ritchie in 1979. It covers the beginnings of Unix at Bell Labs.
An interesting point from the paper is that Unix and C weren’t completely planned out and then implemented but (after some initial planning) were developed iteratively, as they went along. As a result some things weren’t done as well as they could have been: “Process control in its modern form was designed and implemented within a couple of days. It is astonishing how easily it fitted into the existing system; at the same time it is easy to see how some of the slightly unusual features of the design are present precisely because they represented small, easily-coded changes to what existed. A good example is the separation of the fork and exec functions…it seems reasonable to suppose that it exists in Unix mainly because of the ease with which fork could be implemented without changing much else…a combined fork-exec would have been considerably more com- plicated, if only because exec as such did not exist”
