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What Is It?

A group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs created the UNIX operating system in 1969 and it remains one of the most highly regarded, powerful, versatile and flexible operating systems (OS) in use today. This OS is capable of running micros to supercomputers and its portability allows manufacturers to adopt it with ease. UNIX fosters a distinctive software design approach that solves problems by interconnecting simple tools rather than by creating or relying upon complicated application programs.

During the latter part of the twentieth century, academics were drawn to the UNIX OS, leading to large-scale adoption of the process, especially the BSD variant that originated from the University of California, Berkely. BSD variants and Linux represent two commonly encountered Unix-like operating systems that stemmed from this process.

Today, the Open Group owns the UNIX® trademark, and the definition of UNIX® takes the form of the worldwide Single UNIX Specification integrating X/Open Company’s XPG4, IEEE’s POSIX Standards and ISO C. Open Group is an industry standards consortium that requires that only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as UNIX® products. All other products are labeled as Unix compatible or “Unix-like” systems.

Who Is it For?

According to the Open Group Web site, this group is committed to working with the development community to further standards conformant systems by evolving and maintaining the Single UNIX Specification and participation in other related standards efforts. Recent examples of this compliance include making the standard freely available on the Web, permitting reuse of the standard in open source documentation projects, providing test tools, and developing certification programs.

Users can find online tutorials, books, white papers and more that define these specifications and that show how to set up and use a UNIX system. UNIX systems utilize a graphical user interface (GUI) similar to Microsoft Windows. This interface provides an easy-to-use environment for beginning developers and users. With that said, knowledge of UNIX is required for operations, as those capabilities aren’t enabled by a graphical program.

Many Web host providers now offer both Unix-based and Windows servers to clients, providing a choice between operating systems so that clients can choose the server that best meets the needs of hosting operations and programs utilized by that client.

Features

Despite the myth that a UNIX system is difficult to set up, this OS is almost as easy to utilize as proprietary systems. However, more users are familiar with the Windows OS than with UNIX, so changing from one OS to another can provide some angst especially since some major differences between the two OSs do exist.

Many proprietary operating systems have a simplified view of application behavior, and it is written in an assembly language that requires increasingly complicated and more sophisticated applications as they adapt new features. UNIX, on the other hand, provides a less intensive OS that is simple to maintain, as it was written in C language to implement an operating system without assembly language, rather than a traditional “input-processing-output” application.

In UNIX because the C language was written to be used to implement an operating system rather than a traditional “input-processing-output” application, use of these sophisticated features is quite easily done from the C language without writing any assembly language. So, proprietary OS operations often utilize various languages in their assembly, whereas UNIX maintains a stable C language environment.

Compatibility

Since the UNIX specification has been separated from its licensed source-code product and has become a single stable spec to be used to develop portable applications, developers and end users from beginners to the most advanced can adopt UNIX specs to operate just about any application that runs on systems that conform to the Single UNIX Specification.

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