If you are anxious to know the history of Unix and how it is evolved from being a project to a full-fledged open source platform, a specific repository has now emerged as the best thing for your knowledge. Called Unix History, the repository is currently available on GitHub and is over 1.1GB in size.
The Unix History repository covers its entire evolution, starting from the period of its inception in 1970 as a 2.5 thousand line kernel and 26 commands till the present stage as a 27 million line system. It includes around half a million commits and more than two thousand merges. Also, the repository is touted to be created by “synthesising with custom software 24 snapshots” of systems used at Bell Labs, 386BSD team, two legacy repositories and the modern repository of the open source FreeBSD system.
“The project aim is to put in the repository as much metadata as possible, allowing the automated analysis of Unix history,” reads the description of the repository.
Athenian Diomidis Spinellis has hosted the repository online on GitHub. Moreover, there about a thousand individual contributors who brought their tweaks to the platform.
Developers can access the entire repository from GitHub. A corresponding repository is also available on the online Git platform with all the code and metadata used in the Unix History. This would help in expanding the historical project over time.
