Unix? What is it... really?

Go to the Wikipedia site and do a search on "Unix". You'll find quite a bit about it and its history. You'll find even more doing a Google search.

Unix isn't a programming language, it is a family of operating systems that traces its origins to the 1960's. There have been many, many variants since then, & most if not all modern OS's incorporate some of the concepts & features it pioneered, popularized, or standardized. It is stable & secure largely because it was designed around those goals & has been refined for decades.

Hello Mansa:

In addition to the always fine advice from the previous two posters, this link will take you to the "official" UNIX page which will probably tell you more than you ever wanted to know about UNIX.

http://www.unix.org/

Oddly enough, I was just reading information from this site a couple of weeks ago (I am UNIX challenged and plan to stay that way!).

Barry

At the risk of repeating others, I will try to add some extra info to this thread.

UNIX is an operating system, like Windows XP or OSX, however it is incredibly old and didn't actually have a GUI (Graphical User Interface) like modern day systems - the original Mac OS pioneered that. If you open up Terminal (in the Utilities folder), you can get an idea of what UNIX used to look like - I wouldn't type anything however, unless you have a good idea of what you are doing, since it is easy to mess up the whole OS with a simple command. OSX is simply a distribution of UNIX, BSD, with alot of bells and whistles. The many incarnations of Linux are all based upon UNIX. If you want to see what is actually going on inside the UNIX part of OSX, type 'top' in Terminal, and press return. When you've finished, press Ctrl-C and quit Terminal.

Hope that helped, at least a bit.

Josh

To complicate things even more, this link is to the UNIX family that is generally considered the alternative to the variant that OS X descended from (BSD). It is the family that officially owns the name "UNIX" & all other variants are properly (if not always!) referred to as UNIX-like OS's, or so the lawyers would like. 🙂

As Kappy suggested, Wikipedia is a great source of info on the history of UNIX. Try this entry for an overview, including a chart that shows the historic development of the OS & its variants. As of today anyway, it shows the path that ends in OS X & how it relates to other popular variants.

Have you seen this? It may serve to confuse of course 😉 My own interpretation is that UNIX is a survivor in the OS world, having been attacked and improved by a multitude of people over more than 35 years. However, there are so many variants, mutations and so on.

http://www.levenez.com/unix/

Edit: Here is another piece.

http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/