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When Bell Labs finally closed its doors on Department 1127 this month, it didn't signal the end of Unix. Perhaps the end of an operating system research environment at Lucent, as most of the original team are long gone to other ventures (Google, Pixar, NASA/JPL, Princeton, Dartmouth...) or retired anyway.

Hardly. Unix was first developed around 1970 (aka the "epoch"), and the original concepts and many of the technologies are stronger than ever. The vast majority of the servers that drive the Internet and the Web are some form of Unix operating system. Hell, we wouldn't have an Internet if wasn't for the role that Unix played in it.

I use Linux, FreeBSD and OS X everyday. Both as servers, and as desktop environments. There are countless other Unix variants, both open-source (OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Darwin...) as well as commercial ones (Sun, HP...).

And all of this, thanks to a couple of guys who were allowed to tinker with and old PDP-11 in exchange for developing an electronic typesetting system so AT&T could publish their own technical manuals. Oh, and while they were at it they threw in a little thing called the C programming language. But that's another story.

The King is dead, long live the King!