I'm truly saddened to learn that the Unix research team at Bell Labs has formerly dissolved. Anyone that uses the internet owes a great debt to the founders of UNIX. As you powered the internet and was largely responsible for fostering the embryonic growth of the wide world web.
Before the era of the wide world web(circa 1977), the net was primarily a collection of machines owned by government researchers and later academic institutions. A collaborative effort existed between Bell Labs and the universities (ie MIT and Berkeley). Unix was written in C programming language, which was widely available at universities across the country. Bell Labs scientists, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were the chief architects of C and Unix.
Unfortunately, Unix would later splinter into various factions due to licensing and commercialization. The failure of the corporate players to resolve the licensing problems allowed M$ to discover the internet and perhaps more importantly planted the seeds for Linux.
