Unix was born in 1969 out of the mind of a computer scientist at Bell Laboratories, Ken Thompson. Thompson had been a researcher on the Multics project, an experience which spoiled him for the primitive batch computing that was the rule almost everywhere else. But the concept of timesharing was still a novel one in the late 1960s; the first speculations on it had been uttered barely ten years earlier by computer scientist John McCarthy (also the inventor of the Lisp language), the first actual deployment had been in 1962, seven years earlier, and timesharing operating systems were still experimental and temperamental beasts. Computer hardware was at that time more primitive than even people who were there to see it can now easily recall. The most powerful machines of the day had less computing power and internal memory than a typical cellphone of today. Video display terminals were in their infancy and would not be widely deployed for another six years. The standard interactive device on the earliest timesharing systems was the ASR-33 teletype - a slow, noisy device that printed upper-case-only on big rolls of yellow paper. The ASR-33 was the natural parent of the Unix tradition of terse commands and sparse responses. When Bell Labs withdrew from the Multics research consortium, Ken Thompson was left with some Multics-inspired ideas about how to build a file system. He was also left without a machine on which to play a game he had written called Space Travel, a science-fiction simulation that involved navigating a rocket through the solar system. Unix began its life on a scavenged PDP-7 minicomputer, as a platform for the Space Travel game and a testbed for Thompson's ideas about operating system design. [adapted from http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html]