"Hello world!"

Those simple words, computer-generated onto an attached printer, in one fell swoop, both heralded and ushered in a revolution in computing.

On a noisy printer in Bell Labs, two young men had labored for days -- and NIGHTS, if my own experience taught me anything -- to create and write a computer program that, at once, would fit into the limited computing space of their early Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-7 (DEC PDP-7) and predict movement of stars and planets. Testing the draft-version of their new programming concept, the two young men had it print out only the words: Hello World!

They didn't have the big, heavy, IBM 360 mainframe, so prevalent in big business in those days. Their department's tiny budget allowed only for the "mini"-computer. "Mini" did not mean "small"!

"Mini" meant only "not huge"!

A mini-computer lived in a frame, which typically stretched from floor to ceiling - roughly 7 feet - and really thrived in an air-conditioned, climate-controlled room.

If their DEC computer had a hard disk drive, it would have been housed in a washing-machine-sized cabinet, and held several stacked metal platters. A typical one of that era might have held 8 megabytes on 8 platters, stood a little over waist-high, and been operated from a keyboard - printer terminal. Instructions were typewritten on the keyboard and the computed results printed out on the same machine. Video Display Terminals were uncommon.

But, in this environment, an elegant, simple, powerful programming language was born. They called it UNIX.

For all posterity, their names are recorded in the annals of computing history: Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie.

more information . . . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix