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Unix
is an operating system that is said to be designed for programmers by the programmers.
AT&T employees at Bell Labs developed the Unix operating system in 1969 which
are largely used in workstations and servers.
It is a multitasking, multi-user,
portable operating system which made it widely adopted by academic institutions,
industry and businesses.
Though the operating system was originally targeted for
the medium sized computers, now it is used in very powerful mainframe computers.
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The goal
in designing the Unix operating system was to provide multiple programmers a way
to access and share the resources of a computer simultaneously making the illusion
to the user that no one else is sharing the computer.
This great feature of resources
being shared in real time made Unix as one of the most powerful operating systems.Based
on the requirement of the applications, different tools like email can be included
or removed from Unix system.
Kernel, Shell, Tools and applications can be treated
as the three levels of applications of a Unix system.
The kernel which was written
in the assembly language does the storage management and schedules the tasks.
The
shell connects and interprets the commands of the user. For the additional functionality
like email we can use tools and applications.
The Unix
operating system was written in high level language instead of assembly languages
and had tremendous impact on other operating systems. It considers every type of
file as simple arrays of bytes.
Unix
operating system made it possible major applications like Internet, e-commerce,
laboratory simulations and Computer aided designs.
For the experience programmer,
Unix is a really a great system to work with.
But the user interface for the operating
system is not so great.
Some advancement includes the addition of windowing interfaces
like X-Windows, NextStep, Suntools which were built on top of Unix for providing
a good interface.
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Even though it has not great user interface, it still runs on
computers from desktops to largest computers.
The power of Unix operating system
lies in its portability across many platforms and vendor independent networking.
So, if we acquire the Unix skills we can work on wide variety of systems.
To make
the upgrades an easier task, always the new versions of Unix were made backward
compatible with the older versions.
Unix
variants can have their own commands and qualities. They are developed mainly
to work with many varieties of hardware. There is a long list of Unix variants in
which some of them are no longer available.
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