[Froufrou]

This is a forerunner to Microcsoft or something akin to that? See, I was asking you because I am not a techie...baby steps, please...

[AnotherUnixGeek]

This is a forerunner to Microcsoft or something akin to that?

Unix is an operating system - the underlying software which manages the hardware and processes commands by you and by various programs running on your computer. When you bring up Windows, you see a graphic user interface running on top of the Windows XP operating system.

Unix isn't a forerunner to Microsoft DOS or the various Windows versions, but the Unix operating system in various forms has been used on workstations built by Sun, IBM, HP, DEC, and others. If you use Mac OSX these days, you're running Unix.