Reeds and Weinberger

James A. Reeds, B.A. (Mathematics), 1970, University of Michigan; M.A. (Mathematics),

1972, Brandeis University; Ph.D. (Statistics), 1976, Harvard University; Assistant Professor of
Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, 1977–1982, AT&T Bell Laboratories, 1983—.

Peter J. Weinberger, B.S. (Mathematics), 1964, Swarthmore College; Ph.D. (Mathematics),

1969, University of California at Berkeley; Bellcomm, Inc., 1969–1970; Instructor and Assistant
Professor of Mathematics, University of Michigan, 1970–1976, AT&T Bell Laboratories, 1976.-

UNIX- This is the second issue of the Technical Journal devoted exclusively to papers on the
family of computer operating systems bearing the UNIX trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories.
The UNIX operating system was created in 1969 by K. Thompson and D. M. Ritchie. Its growth
since then, in both the commercial world and the research community, has been truly
remarkable. In the commercial world there are 100,000 UNIX systems in operation, and many
hundreds of thousands of programmers who have studied the system's commands and its
implementation language C. In the research community, dozens of books and thousands of
papers have been written about it, and in 1983 Thompson and Ritchie earned the Turing Award
for its invention. Virtually every major university throughout the world now uses the UNIX
system. UNIX is an evolving system. In the Computing Science Research Center at AT&T Bell
Laboratories, where it was invented, the system has developed in a series of releases called
"editions" or "versions". The paper by Ritchie in this issue describes the birth of the system in
this research environment. UNIX System V is available to the commercial world from AT&T in
a fully supported form. Not only has the system provided the computing community a * AT&T
Bell Laboratories.

Sufficiently large files encrypted with the UNIX™ system crypt command can be deciphered in
a few hours by algebraic techniques and human interaction. We outline such a decryption
method and show it to be applicable to a proposed strengthened algorithm as well. We also
discuss the role of encryption in file security.

History of Unix
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental
time sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe.
Multics
Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is an influential early time-sharing
operating system begun in 1965 and used until 2000. Based around the concept of a single-level
memory. Virtually all modern operating systems were heavily influenced by Multics—often
through Unix, which had been created by some of the people who had worked on Multics—
either directly (Linux, macOS) or indirectly (Windows NT).

Multics included
—a supervisor program that managed all hardware resources, using symmetric —
multiprocessing, multiprogramming, and paging
—an innovative segmented memory addressing system supported by hardware
—a tree structured file system
—device support for peripherals and terminals
—hundreds of command programs, including language compilers and tools
—hundreds of user-callable library routines
—operational and support tools
—user and system documentation