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.