The UNIX Operating System: Pipes, Files, and Composable Tools
Members of Technical Staff, Bell Laboratories
Historic Bell Labs presentation demonstrating hierarchical file descriptors, standard I/O pipelines, the C language, and building complex software out of small composable filters.
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In the late 1960s, Bell Laboratories computer scientists Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson started work on a project that was inspired by an operating system called Multics, a joint project of MIT, GE, and Bell Labs. The host and narrator of this film, Victor Vyssotsky, also had worked on the Multics project. Ritchie and Thompson, recognizing some of the problems with the Multics OS, set out to create a more useful, flexible, and portable system for programmers to work with.