Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture - Neal Stephenson

Unix is the Latin of computer science - Ward Cunningham

I have made enough off-hand references to Unix, and so I thought I'd add a page devoted to it.

Unix is the "once and future" operating system. Originally developed by hackers Thompson and Ritchie at AT&T Bell Labs in about 1970, it became the operating system of choice among American comp-sci programs (notably the one at UC Berkeley) and was developed in an open-sharing, modular way by hundreds or thousands of developers through the 70s, 80s, and beyond.

In the 1980s, with a computer industry in full swing, AT&T—themselves prevented from selling it due to their historical anti-trust restrictions—licensed it to a number of vendors (IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, DEC, etc.) who created nearly-incompatible proprietary versions of it. An effort to standardize the differing versions barely saved it from extinction.

What really saved it was Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation and GNU project in the 1980s, and later Linus Torvald's WILDLY successful Linux (essentially, the creation of a free-licensed Unix for intel-based PCs), and then the "Open Source" movement, which institutionalized much of Unix culture.

In the early 21st century, Unix is in a renaissance. It is largely the underlying architecture of the Internet; it provides most of the paradigm for modern operating systems (like Windows), and, as of OS X, Apple adopted it as a core part of the Macintosh: when you open up the Terminal app, you are seeing Berkeley Unix.

Resources abound. It is not too much a stretch to say that the Internet is the documentation for Unix and Unix culture. Start with WikiPedia:Unix