LINUX INTRODUCTION
Mommy, Where Did Unix Come From?
Sometime in the mid 1960s, a bunch of geeks at AT&T's Bell Labs decided it would be fun to create a new
operating system called Multics. (This was no small task, because computers at the time were about the size
of a football field and two stories high.) Multics fizzled in 1969 when Bell cut the cord, but some of the
geeks continued work on what became known as UNIX; and it became wildly popular inside AT&T.
Since AT&T was not allowed to sell computer software at the time, it gave away UNIX (complete with
source code) to any educational institution. AT&T produced new versions of UNIX called System III and
System V in the early 1980s, but all the while, geeks at the University of California at Berkeley and other
places were busy hacking away on their own versions of Unix based on the AT&T code. Some cross-pollination did occur, but there are still significant differences between the Berkeley (commonly called
BSD Unix) and AT&T flavors. In the early 1990s, AT&T sold UNIX to Novell, which was bought by
Digital Equipment Corporation, which sold it to SCO (Santa Cruz Operation), which markets it as
UNIXWare.
Today, there are now lots of Unix variants sold or given away by many different companies and
universities. While these various flavors can make it difficult to write portable software, efforts to
standardize Unix (two of the more notable ones being POSIX and COSE) offer hope for greater
compatibility in the future.
Like any operating system, Unix has some cryptic commands and less-than-intuitive aspects. (Three of the
most important Unix commands have the peculiar names cat, grep, and awk .) Either serious hallucinogens
or a warped sense of humor came into play at some point in the creation of Unix. I don't let this bother me,
though, taking comfort in my favorite platitude: "Unix was written by geeks on drugs." Seriously, though,
Unix is really no more difficult to learn than DOS or Windows--it's just different.
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Copyright ©
by Bob Rankin
All rights reserved - Redistribution is allowed only with permission.
