Oldest operating system still in wide use. Created parallel to the Internet in the 1960s, Unix revolves around a couple simple laws:
- treat everything as a file. Raw devices, hardware busses, everything.
- make a lot of little, simple tools that do little, simple jobs perfectly (or as close to perfectly as possible)
- make it easy to chain those little tools together so that big things are possible.
Unix has a wide and deep history, from the original versions by AT&T to the BSD series created at UC Berkeley. There always seems to be an active lawsuit concerning who owns what, as freely available source code mingles with closed source code. In the past, it was fashionable for computer companies to distribute customized ‘flavors’ of Unix. Even Microsoft dabbled in Unix with its “XENIX” product, which ran on Intel 80386 processors. XENIX was a variant of SCO Unix, which traces its lineage back to the original AT&T System V. I remember playing with a 386 machine running XENIX in the summer of 1991. I had two other machines running terminal emulation software hooked off of the two serial ports on the ‘server.’ Heady days.
The traditional spot for Unix is in the server room, where its attention to security, multi-user capabilities, and networking subsystems are key. Thanks to Linux, which is not Unix, but a clone of Unix, Unix-ish devices run the gamut from the very small to the very large.
The most popular version of Unix is Apple’s Mac OS X, which is a variant of BSD Unix.
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