History of Unix Shells

History of Unix Shells

• 1979 bsh

The first major shell was the Bourne shell (named after its inventor, Steven Bourne);

It was included in the first popular version of UNIX, Version 7, starting in 1979. The

Bourne shell is known on the system as sh. Although UNIX has gone through many,

many changes, the Bourne shell is still popular and essentially unchanged. Several

UNIX utilities and administration features depend on it.

• csh/tcsh

The first widely-used alternative shell was the C shell , or  csh .  This was written by Bill

Joy at the University of California at Berkeley as part of the Berkeley System Distribution

(BSD) version of UNIX that came out a couple of years after Version 7. It's included in

most recent UNIX versions.The C shell gets its name from the resemblance of its

commands to statements in the C Programming Language, which makes the shell easier

for programmers on UNIX systems to learn.