Web site: www.opengroup.org/unix-systems
Origin: USA
Category: Workstation
Desktop environment: CLI, GUI
Architecture: Cross-platform
Based on: Independent
Wikipedia: Unix
Media: Install
The last version | Released: unknown
Unix (The Unix Time-Sharing System) – an operating system developed from 1969 at Bell Labs (UNIX System Laboratories, USL) by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. It gained widespread popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, spawning numerous variants and implementations. Some of these, particularly Linux, BSD, and macOS, are still in use today. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
UNIX is not an acronym – the name “UNIX” is a pun on Multics, which served as the model for Unix.
Unix made a significant contribution to the development of operating systems, introducing many concepts that remain in widespread use today. The most significant include the widespread adoption of a hierarchical file system and the representation of almost all system components (including peripherals) as files. The system’s creators employed many innovative solutions and design principles during its development. System tools were designed according to the KISS principle, which states that programs should be simple and do one thing well.
In the 1960s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were designing an experimental operating system called Multics (Multiplexing Information and Computer Services) for the GE 645 computer[in other languages]. It featured a number of innovative features (e.g., dynamic libraries, hot swapping, and a hierarchical file system), but development dragged on.
Dissatisfied with the results, but not with the design intent, Bell Labs withdrew from the project in 1969. The last employees of the company to work on Multics were Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M.D. McIlroy, and J.F. Ossanna. They decided to start over, but on a much smaller scale.
The system was initially called Unics, a joke by one of Thompson’s colleagues, Brian Kernighan.[4] Because the system supported only one Thomson user, it was called Un-multiplexed Information and Computing Service, a pun on the Multics system.
The Unix screenshot and content source: Wikipedia; License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
See also: UNIX System III, UNIX System V, AT&T UNIX PC and /tag/unix/
