Ken Thompson, a programmer in the Labs' computing research department, had worked on Multics. He decided to write his own operating system. ... In 1984, several European computer vendors established the X/Open consortium with the goal of creating an open system specification based on Unix (and eventually the SVID). Yet another standardization ...

History and influence. The ed text editor was one of the first three key elements of the Unix operating system—assembler, editor, and shell—developed by Ken Thompson in August 1969 on a PDP-7 at AT&T Bell Labs. Many features of ed came from the qed text editor developed at Thompson's alma mater University of California, Berkeley. Thompson was very familiar with …