Posted on 08/25/2009 7:35:29 PM PDT by Star Traveler
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.Wikipedia Article link
Both statements are true... but the official trademark of Unix is UNIX™ or UNIX™ with either all caps or small caps for the last three characters, so either Unix or UNIX are correct in text.
Unix was created by Ken & Dennis after coming off of the Multics project. Unix is a "weak pun" on Multics. Ken Thompson needed something to run a space war game on a shiny new PDP 7. Dennis wrote a compiler for him. Deciding they needed to prove to their managers that they were really working, they sold the project to management as a document writing platform. Dennis Ritchie wrote the first file system (the setuid bit patent bears his name). Joe Ossanna wrote troff. The memory pressure that troff brought to bear on the system lead them to divide i & d space thus bringing the total process memory to a whopping 128k.
Writing the kernel mostly in a high level language proved to be a stroke of genius that would change the computing world forever, though it would take another decade and a half for the rest of the world to figure this out.
Dennis Ritchie's compiler was never ported away from the PDP. Steve Johnson wrote the "portable C compiler" which would ultimately inspire gcc.
Due to AT&T's status as a telephone monopoly, they were not allowed to commercialize the system. That wouldn't come until the 1980s and they did that as badly as they anything non-technical - "AT&T couldn't market eternal life".
Because they couldn't market the system, it was distributed as source code to Universities and eventually folks at Berkeley picked it up and hacked on it to produce BSD. Source licenses were typical through the 1980s. My first official on-the-job experience with Unix in 1987 was on a Pyramid that had a hybrid interface divided into universes (with source code). You could either select a BSD-ish or a System V-ish style system interface. Sadly, Pyramid did not revolutionize the world, but they were awesome machines for their time.
The earliest Unix box I got my hands on personally was a Stride 440 running a beta System V/R2 in 1985. Sadly, their Unix port never supported the bit mapped graphics that their hardware supported. The AT&T 3B1 aka Unix PC, which was the first commercial Unix desktop, predated Microsoft Windows and did support bitmapped graphics and a mouse, but was marketed very badly. It didn't become particularly reasonable to buy until after it was EOLed.
Oh Unix, how I love thee (and how good you look on my Macbook Pro) ...
You said — I’m kind of like the last person in the world you want to throw Wikipedia links at :-). Especially Unix links ...
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Then I’ll throw a couple of different links at you... :-)
Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” and The UNIX® You Know, The Mac You Love
The most widely-sold UNIX operating system, Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard combines a fully-conformant UNIX foundation with the richness and usability of the Macintosh interface, bringing multi-core technology and 64-bit power to the mass market. In Leopard, the new tabbed Terminal, Ruby on Rails web application stack, and powerful scripting bridges make UNIX users more productive than ever.
[ ... ]
http://developer.apple.com/unix/
And...
Make UNIX work with Windows XP and Mac OS X
Be a good server to your client workstations
Chris Herborth (chrish@pobox.com), Freelance Writer, Consultant
Summary: Learn about using a UNIX® system as a primary domain controller (PDC) and file repository, including an anonymous, read-only shared area accessible by anyone with a Web browser. To be a good citizen on your local network, you need to integrate your favorite UNIX system with the networking features of client systems, generally running Windows® XP or Mac OS X. This makes it easier for the users of those workstations to take advantage of the centralized authentication and storage facilities you can provide.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-unixothers/
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UNIX for Mac OS X: Visual QuickPro Guide
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201795353
or...
UNIX Tips for Mac OS X
Here is a list of short tips on using various UNIX tools under Mac OS X - some of them might just be reminders for myself. Some of them are also applicable to other flavors of UNIX.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~benhdj/Mac/unix.html
:-)
Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” and The UNIX® You Know, The Mac You Love
The Unix and Mac I love, but close enough ... and certainly Works For Me.
Thanks for the links.
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