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Comment by nick__m | Hacker News Reader

It was created for the PDP-11, a minicomputer. It was smaller than a mainframe but larger than a microcomputer (also know as the personal computer).

You are correct about Kernighan and if you want to know more about the story behind early UNIX, I recommend this book: "UNIX: A History and a Memoir".

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> It was smaller than a mainframe but larger than a microcomputer (also know as the personal computer).

Microcomputers didn't exist until R2E released the Micral N years later, and François Gernelle came up with this word. The Personal Computer was created by IBM in 1981, eight years after the birth of the microcomputer.

You're not entirely wrong though, UNIX (think X as cross platform) was technically born with the C language on the PDP-11.

The early "Unics" was written in assembly for the 18 bits PDPs ISA (more precisely a PDP-7, but the ISA was shared with the 1, 4, 7, 9 and 15). Then they came up with a new high level language to port it to the 16 bits PDP-11 ISA, which eventually became C.

Most microcomputers were called "Personal Computers" back even before IBM's PC came out. i.e. the Apple II was a personal computer. The generic term just meant you were not sharing the machine with someone else.

Unix was originally created on a PDP-7, and later ported to an 11/20.

Neither is substantially larger than a rack-mount PC.

You are right, my inflationist memory transformed the 7 into a 11 !

Here's a tale about bringing Unix V0 up on a recovered PDP-7 at the Living Computers Museum + Lab[0]. They logged in as 'dmr'.

[0] https://livingcomputers.org/Blog/Restoring-UNIX-v0-on-a-PDP-...

That looks substantially larger than a rack-mount PC.

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