Preview

Definition of Unix and History

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
2503 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Definition of Unix and History
Unix * (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with small caps) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit organizations.
The Open Group, an industry standards consortium, owns the “Unix” trademark. Only systems fully compliant with and certified according to the Single UNIX Specification are qualified to use the trademark; others might be called "Unix system-like" or "Unix-like" (though the Open Group disapproves of this term). However, the term "Unix" is often used informally to denote any operating system that closely resembles the trademarked system.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix (particularly of the BSD variant, originating from the University of California, Berkeley) by commercial startups, the most notable of which are Solaris, HP-UX and AIX. Today, in addition to certified Unix systems such as those already mentioned, Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD descendants (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD) are commonly encountered. The term "traditional Unix" may be used to describe a Unix or an operating system that has the characteristics of either Version 7 Unix or UNIX .

History of Unix In the 1960s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric developed an experimental operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe.[2] Multics was highly innovative, but had many problems.
Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not the aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna,[3] decided to redo

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    Week 5 Pos 355

    • 2010 Words
    • 9 Pages

    The UNIX and Linux Operating Systems (OS) are open source systems. The first version of UNIX was created in 1969 by computer scientist Kenneth Thompson at AT&T Bell Laboratories. The system was based on four parts: the shell, kernel, editor, and the assembler. Linux was created as a free software substitute to the commercial UNIX environments. The history of Linux dates back to 1983 and Linux runs a much greater range of platforms than most UNIX environments. Both OS share a common foundation because of the history and tradition.…

    • 2010 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Nt1330 Unit 9 Quiz

    • 1332 Words
    • 6 Pages

    BSD Unix was released, followed by Bell Labs Unix, followed by Linux, followed by GNU…

    • 1332 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    6. Which of the following is the UNIX distribution originally developed through AT&T Bell Labs?…

    • 2601 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Both the operating system and software applications improve the organizations ability to operate in an efficient and effective manner. There are four operating systems which include: Windows, Mac OS, Unix, and Linux. Operating systems handle data that is received, processed, saved, and backed up through application software. According to Kroenke (2012), “for business users, the most important operating system is Microsoft Windows. Some version of Windows resides on more than 85 percent of the world’s desktops and considering just business users, the figure is more than 95 percent” (p. 80). The Mac OS operating systems are primarily used by artists and workers in the arts community. Whereas Unix is used more so in the scientific and engineering communities.…

    • 796 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dan Blacharski (Dec 2000). Unix vs. Linux, ComputerUser Inc. Retrieved July 16, 2008 from: http://www.computeruser.com/about/copyright.html…

    • 852 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    1. The difference between UNIX and Linux is that UNIX trademark is specific to systems that meet a complex set of X/Open standards and has a cost whereas Linux is open source…

    • 537 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    History Of Unix

    • 4295 Words
    • 15 Pages

    UNIX has been a popular OS for more than two decades because of its multi-user, multi-tasking environment, stability, portability and powerful networking capabilities. In the late 1960s, researchers from General Electric, MIT and Bell Labs launched a joint project to develop an ambitious multi-user, multi-tasking OS for mainframe computers known as MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing System). MULTICS failed (for some MULTICS enthusiasts"failed" is perhaps too strong a word to use here), but it did inspire Ken Thompson, who was a researcher at Bell Labs, to have a go at writing a simpler operating system himself. He wrote a simpler version of MULTICS on a PDP7 in assembler and called his attempt UNICS (Uniplexed Information and Computing System). Because memory and CPU power were at a premium in those days, UNICS (eventually shortened to UNIX) used short commands to minimize the space needed to store them and the time needed to decode them - hence the tradition of short UNIX commands we use today, e.g. ls, cp, rm, mv etc.…

    • 4295 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    4. GNU stands for "GNU'S Not Unix", and it was designed to be a UNIX-like operating system developed by Richard Stallman. The Free Software Foundation is the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Project. GNU developed many of the tools, including the C compiler, which are part of the Linux operating system. Linux is the name of the operating system kernel developed by Linus Torvalds, which has since been expanded and improved by thousands of people on the Internet. Torvalds’ kernel and GNU’s tools work together as the Linux operating system.…

    • 516 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Linux is the name of the operating system kernel developed by Linus Torvalds, which has since been expanded and improved by thousands of people on the Internet.…

    • 392 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Assignment 1,Section I

    • 326 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Examples of popular modern operating systems include Android, BSD, iOS, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows,[3] Windows Phone, and IBM z/OS. All these, except Windows and z/OS, share roots in UNIX.…

    • 326 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    unit 1

    • 641 Words
    • 2 Pages

    GNU stands for "GNU'S Not Unix", and it was designed to be a UNIX-like operating system developed by Richard Stallman. Linux is the name of operating system kernel developed by Linus Torvalds. GNU's tools aside the Linux kernel make the operating system known as “Linux” aka “GNU/Linux”. Thousands of people helped refine the operating system online.…

    • 641 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Unit 1 Chapter Exercise

    • 649 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The GNU is a completely free operating system built by Richard Stallman and many of its components, except for the kernel, were completed in the early '90s. Linus Torvalds wrote the kernel for Linux, which was also intended to be a free operating system, in the early '90s. The two systems then were combined together to finish Linux, with its original kernel and added features supplied by GNU. Linux was born off the internet with hundreds of people helping to develop it in its early years.…

    • 649 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    linux unit1 assignment1

    • 825 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Answer: GNU stands for "GNU'S Not Unix", and it was designed to be a UNIX-like operating system developed by Richard Stallman. Linux is the name of operating system kernel developed by Linus Torvalds. GNU's tools aside the Linux kernel make the operating system known as “Linux” aka “GNU/Linux”. Thousands of people helped refine the operating system online.…

    • 825 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    3 Platform Research

    • 805 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Unix is a registered trademark of The Open Group that refers to a family of computer operating systems. Officially licensed Unix operating systems include OS X (Apple), Solaris (Oracle), AIX (IBM), IRIX (SGI), and HP-UX (Hewlett-Packard).…

    • 805 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The History of Linux

    • 976 Words
    • 4 Pages

    It all began in 1991, during the time of monumental computing development. DOS had been bought from a Seattle hacker by Bill Gates, for a sum of $50,000 – a small price for an operating system that had managed sneak its way across the globe due to a clever marketing strategy. Apple's OS and UNIX were both available, though the cost of running either was far greater than that of running DOS. Enter MINIX, an operating system developed from the ground up by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a college professor. MINIX was part of a lesson plan used to teach students the inner-workings of an operating system. Tanenbaum had written a book on MINIX called "Operating System" and anyone who had picked up a copy would find the 12,000 lines of code that comprised MINIX itself. This was a big issue; due to the fact that all know (well published) operating systems to that point had been well guarded by software developers, thus making it difficult for people to truly expand on operating system mechanics.…

    • 976 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics