Tomorrow’s Tech Treepowered by Astra

Computing · Recorded milestone

UNIX and C

Recorded year1971

Thompson and Ritchie at Bell Labs create a portable operating system and language.

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Built on

TransistorRecorded · 1947requires
Integrated circuitRecorded · 1958requires
Time-sharingRecorded · 1961enables
ASCII text codeRecorded · 1963enables

Led to

Usenet newsgroupsRecorded · 1980enables
Chip design software (EDA)Recorded · 1981enables
Free software movementRecorded · 1983enables
Internet wormRecorded · 1988enables
Open-source LinuxRecorded · 1991enables
Enterprise resource planningRecorded · 1992enables
UTF-8 text encodingRecorded · 1992enables

Sources & evidence

Additional source

Dataset updated 2026-10-18. This individual record has not been separately re-reviewed.