But Unix, the operating system that in one derivative or another powers nearly all smartphones sold worldwide, was born 50 years ago from the failure of an ambitious project that involved titans ...

The old UNIX file permission system is commonly the only method of access control that people use. The basic file ownership permissions (user, group, and world/other) on UNIX are a bit outdated.

The team did deliver Unix as a text processing application to the Patent Department, but an operating system was what Bell eventually got—albeit a rough one at first.

File photos of Dennis Ritchie, left and Ken Thompson (YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images), recipients of the Japan Prize. ... The pair called the system UNIX.

But even if the file system was somewhat true to life, the typical Hollywood interpretation of hacking presides. In the famous scene where Lex sits down at the computer with the line, “It’s a ...