Learning about "The Unix Time-Sharing System"

The article recounts how Ken Thompson, after AT&T abandoned the Multics project, repurposed an idle GE-645 and later a PDP-7 to develop the first Unix system, writing a compiler, editor, assembler, loader, and user-protection mechanisms in roughly three weeks. It highlights Thompson’s focus on optimizing drum-disk throughput and explains the early Unix file-opening semantics that replaced Multics’ single-level store with a descriptor-based approach.