Einar Kjartansson began writing what is now called SU (the SY package) in the late 1970s while still a graduate student at Jon Claerbout's Stanford Exploration Project (SEP).

In 1984, during an extended visit to SEP Kjartansson introduced SY to Shuki Ronen, then a graduate student at Stanford.

SY was inspired by much other software developed at SEP and benefited from the foundations laid by Claerbout and many of his students; Rob Clayton, Stew Levin, Dave Hale, Jeff Thorson, Chuck Sword, and others who pioneered seismic processing on Unix in the seventies and early eighties.

Dave Hale wrote several of the heavy lifting processing codes as well as most of the core scientific and graphics libraries.[when?]

Many of the programs run simply by a command on the terminal, for instance, to visualize a seismogram, as wiggle traces or as an image plot It is also possible, to use bash features to elaborate more complex processing structures: In the example above Seismic Unix will create 100 seismograms in 100 different source positions Here will have an explanation of how SU data is, it's headers and how they are organized in a big SU file with more than one gather: --header—data—header—data--... Seismic Unix has many of the processes needed on the geophysical processing.