UNIX

UNIX

UNIX

Unix is a multi-user and multitasking operating system that was developed in the early 1970's by scientists from Bell Laboratories. Because of federal regulations Bell Laboratories was prohibited from promoting UNIX in the commercial marketplace but instead licensed it to colleges and universities for a low fee. At the schools it was implemented on many different types of computers.

After the deregulation of the phone companies in the 1980's UNIX was licensed to many hardware and software companies, which in turn created their own computer architectures and boosted many different strengths and features to suit their customers (Eric, 2006). In 1984 the concept of "open systems" was developed which allowed application portability, system interoperability, and user portability between many different computer vendor hardware platforms. TCP/IP networking protocols were also included to provide a multi-vendor networking capability based on Ethernet networking. This included remote login, file transfer, electronic mail, and other important features.

UNIX was first formulated in the Bell Laboratories under AT&T. Its development is primarily associated with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The reason behind its development was, remarkably enough, because Ken Thompson had developed a game called Space Travel for a mainframe OS. Mainframe time was expensive. They decided to transform the game to run on a smaller computer. But a new operating system was needed and voila! - UNIX.

The UNIX project team members established a set of guidelines to assist them in development of the system:

(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.

(iii) Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

(iv) Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them (Eric, 2006).

Until release of UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) Sun had used BSD as the foundation for their systems. With SVR4 the efforts to consolidate and bring the best into one package were initiated and to make UNIX a truly "open" operating system. This process is known as Common Open Software Environment (COSE). A great achievement for COSE was the Common Desktop Environment (CDE).

In the 1990s Open Software Foundation (OSF) was created by DEC, HP and IBM in an effort to take a firm stand from a competitive standpoint against Sun and AT&T. OSF1 was developed, only to be implemented by DEC. Of note is the fact that OSF1 still requires a SVR2 license (Eric, 2006).

AT&T sold their interest in UNIX to Novell, who in turn passed off rights to the UNIX trademark to X/Open. MIT contributed to the UNIX evolution during the ...