UNIX

Intro

The Unix Operating system was developed in the 1960's and 1970's by AT&T Bell Labs. The system was designed to be portable, multi-tasking, and multi-user. Basically, Unix is characterized by plain-text files, a command line interpreter (UNIX command shell like Bash), and hierarchical file system (fstab: file where filesystems are defined). It is required that commands be given to access a device; for example "directory/mnt". "mnt" indicates the mount point which is the directory given to the operating system.

UNIX was originally a project known as UNICS (Uniplexed Information and Computing System). This was a play on the MULTICS system at MIT. The first system was officially ran on a PDP-11/20 machine (a 16-bit minicomputer) in 1970.

In 1973, Unix was re-written into the C programming language. Versions 4, 5, and 6 were released by 1975 (included pipes for faster processing speeds). UNIX/32V was released for the VAX (a 32-bit computing architecture) in 1978; it was a port to the PDP-11th Edition UNIX; a virtual memory was added at University of Berkeley. During the 1980's, UNIX System III based on V7 was developed by AT&T. The University of Berkeley developed its own alternative, BSD UNIX. The most important improvement was the addition of the TCP/IP network code to the kernel.

Sun Microsystems developed the SunOS for workstations in 1980. Microsoft released a Unix for 16-bit microcomputers called Xenix in the 1980's. UNIX System V contained various features such as file locking, system administration, etc. During the 1990's, UnixWare was developed by Univel. By the 2000's, HP-UX, IBM’s AIX, and other open source UNIX based operating systems were released.

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