Here’s a genealogy of shells descended from the first Unix shell, the Thompson shell. Each descendant appears at the year that it was first announced to the world. For example, S. R. Bourne announced his shell in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1978 but Bell released it to the world in 1979 or so.
Pull requests are encouraged and welcome.
| Shell a borrows code from b. | |
| Shell a attempts compatibility with, but does not use, b’s source code | |
| Proprietary or closed license at the time that it was announced. Source for many formerly-closed shells are now available for us to look at. For example, Bell Labs released to source code to UNIX, available in a few links below. | |
| Has an open, free, or public license since its release. |
Sources
The authors of a shell are the people credited at the time of the shell’s announcement. These links were last retrieved on February 9, 2019.
Almquist shell
Author: Kenneth Almquist
Also known as ash.
BRL shell
Authors: Doug A Gwyn, Doug Kingston, Ron Natalie, Arnold Robbins, Lou Salkind, and others?
https://web.archive.org/web/20040227010520/http://web.cs.mun.ca:80/~michael/pdksh/CONTRIBUTORS
Desktop KornShell
Author: Stephen J. Pendergrast
Also known as dtksh.
Forsyth shell
Author: Charles Forsyth
I’ve corresponded with Charles Forsyth. He tells me that he ported his shell to MINIX 1 too.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040227010520/http://web.cs.mun.ca:80/~michael/pdksh/CONTRIBUTORS
es shell
Authors: Paul Haahr, Byron Rakitzis
ftp://ftp.sys.toronto.edu/pub/es/old/
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.45.8024
https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/yandros/doc/es-usenix-winter93.html
Public Domain Korn shell, OpenBSD ksh
Author: Eric Gisin
https://web.archive.org/web/20040227010520/http://web.cs.mun.ca:80/~michael/pdksh/CONTRIBUTORS
PWB shell
Author: John Mashey
Programmer’s Work Bench shell, aka Mashey shell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB_shell
https://grosskurth.ca/bib/1976/mashey-command.pdf
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/net.unix-wizards/k1FW4s0X7jw/4GNAGTPHLXQJ
rc shell
Author: Tom Duff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rc
http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/versions?doi=10.1.1.47.1625
tcsh
Authors: Ken Greer, Paul Placeway, Christos Zoulas, et al.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcsh
https://github.com/tcsh-org/tcsh
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/net.sources/BC0V7oosT8k/MKNdzEG_c3AJ