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Unix

Unix (/ˈjnɪks/, YOO-niks; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969[1] at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.[4]

Developer

Unix

Historically proprietary software, while some Unix projects (including BSD family and illumos) are open-source

Development started in 1969
First manual published internally in November 1971 (1971-11)[1]
Announced outside Bell Labs in October 1973 (1973-10)[2]

English

Varies; some versions are proprietary, others are free/open-source software

Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems (SunOS/Solaris), HP/HPE (HP-UX), and IBM (AIX). In the early 1990s, AT&T sold its rights in Unix to Novell, which then sold the UNIX trademark to The Open Group, an industry consortium founded in 1996. The Open Group allows the use of the mark for certified operating systems that comply with the Single UNIX Specification (SUS).


Early versions of Unix ran on PDP-11 computers.


Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the "Unix philosophy". According to this philosophy, the operating system should provide a set of simple tools, each of which performs a limited, well-defined function.[5] A unified and inode-based filesystem and an inter-process communication mechanism known as "pipes" serve as the main means of communication,[4] and a shell scripting and command language (the Unix shell) is used to combine the tools to perform complex workflows.


Unix distinguishes itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language, which allows Unix to operate on numerous platforms.[6]

Kernel

Development environment

ed

Commands

cron

Documentation

[25]

The Unix system is composed of several components that were originally packaged together. By including the development environment, libraries, documents and the portable, modifiable source code for all of these components, in addition to the kernel of an operating system, Unix was a self-contained software system. This was one of the key reasons it emerged as an important teaching and learning tool and has had a broad influence.


The inclusion of these components did not make the system large – the original V7 UNIX distribution, consisting of copies of all of the compiled binaries plus all of the source code and documentation occupied less than 10 MB and arrived on a single nine-track magnetic tape, earning its reputation as a portable system.[24] The printed documentation, typeset from the online sources, was contained in two volumes.


The names and filesystem locations of the Unix components have changed substantially across the history of the system. Nonetheless, the V7 implementation is considered by many to have the canonical early structure:

and free and proprietary software

Comparison of operating systems

Unix systems, and Unix commands

List of operating systems

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Timeline of operating systems

Unix time

Market share of operating systems

Year 2038 problem

; Thompson, K. (July–August 1978). "The UNIX Time-Sharing System". Bell System Technical Journal. 57 (6). Archived from the original on November 3, 2010.

Ritchie, D.M.

. www.levenez.com. Retrieved March 17, 2005.

"UNIX History"

. UNIXguide.net. Retrieved March 17, 2005.

"AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, Tru64"

. lwn.net. Retrieved April 7, 2006.

"Linux Weekly News, February 21, 2002"

: Lions' "Commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System". with Source Code, Peer-to-Peer Communications, 1996; ISBN 1-57398-013-7

Lions, John

at The Open Group.

The UNIX Standard

at the Wayback Machine (archived April 8, 2015)

The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System

at the Wayback Machine (archived April 2, 2014)

The Creation of the UNIX Operating System

The Unix Tree: files from historic releases

on GitHub

Unix History Repository — a git repository representing a reconstructed version of the Unix history

at Curlie

Unix

The Unix 1st Edition Manual

1st Edition manual rendered to HTML

on YouTube (film about Unix featuring Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Alfred Aho, and more)

AT&T Tech Channel Archive: The UNIX Operating System: Making Computers More Productive (1982)

on YouTube (complementary film to the preceding "Making Computers More Productive")

AT&T Tech Channel Archive: The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use (1982)

audio bsdtalk170 - Marshall Kirk McKusick at DCBSDCon -- on history of tcp/ip (in BSD) -- abridgement of the three lectures on the history of BSD.

A History of UNIX before Berkeley: UNIX Evolution: 1975-1984

 – a software perspective on the MC68000 CPU architecture and UNIX compatibility

BYTE Magazine, September 1986: UNIX and the MC68000