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Unix Operating Systems Celebration Day
"If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a UNIX user to show you how it's done."
~ Scott Adams, Dilbert Cartoonist
“Don’t panic!” (unless a bad actor has usurped your computer and run sudo rm -rf /… then panic quietly). Programmers, sysadmins, and computer scientists—picture striding up to your next conference in a kilt woven with this tartan. This is the only operating system with its own tartan—Debian GNU/Linux—and it’s no ordinary pattern. Rotate the sett and you’ll spot “DEBIAN” spelled out in Morse code, with the white stripes marking dots, dashes, and pauses!
It all started in 1969 at Bell Labs, when Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna refused to let the abandoned Multics project vanish into the /dev/null of history. By 1970, they’d christened their sleeker offspring “Unics” (later Unix) as a tongue-in-cheek nod to Multics—Uniplexed Information and Computing Service instead of Multiplexed Information and Computer Services. The rest, as 'man history' might say, is well-documented…
Today, Unix descendants are everywhere: macOS running on millions of laptops, FreeBSD powering routers and servers, Solaris still guarding data centers, and Linux in all its flavors—from Arch (for those who like to build their own kernel before breakfast) to Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and more. Some love nothing better than ./configure && make && make install—because if you didn’t compile it yourself, what's the point?
And Debian, the tartan’s namesake, remains a cornerstone of the open-source ecosystem—rock-solid, endlessly customizable, and peppered with hidden command-line Easter eggs! It’s a reminder that in the Unix world, efficiency and whimsy share the same terminal window. ❤️ 🤍 💙 💛 🖤 ❤️ 💻 💻 💻
Most operating systems can be grouped into two different families. Aside from Microsoft's Windows NT-based operating systems, nearly everything else traces its heritage back to Unix.
First announced on August 16, 1993, by Ian Murdock, who initially called the system "the Debian Linux Release". The word "Debian" was formed as a portmanteau of the first name of his then-girlfriend Debra Lynn and his own first name.
The release included the Debian Linux Manifesto, outlining Murdock's view for the new operating system. In it he called for the creation of a distribution to be maintained openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.
This tartan was designed in 2007 for the eighth annual gathering of developers from all over the world in Edinburgh. The colours are references to various logos: Reds for the Debian swirl, Blue for Captain Blue-Eyes (the old Debian logo), and Yellow, Black & White for Tux, the Linux logo. If the image is rotated 180 degrees, the White can be seen to be arranged so as to spell out DEBIAN in Morse code (with a correct 1:3 ratio for dots to dashes, and for the pauses in and between letters).
For a history of origin of the Unix operating system and its descendants, click the Debian logo!