UNIX is a powerful operating system originally developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In this post unix definition, history or feature are explained in deeply.
Purpose of UNIX(Uniplexed Information and Computing Service)
This operating system is very popular among the scientific, engineering, and academic institutions due to its most appreciating features like multi-user, multi-tasking flexibility, portability, and network capabilities. Moreover, UNIX is a more secure operating system in comparison to another operating system.
History of UNIX
In the late 1960s, a researcher from General Electric, MIT, and Bell Labs launched a joint project to develop an ambitious multiuser, multitasking, OS for mainframe computers known as MULTICS(Multiplexed Information and Computing System). MULTICS could not become a successful OS, but it inspired Ken Thompson, who was a researcher at Bell Labs, to go for writing a simpler operating system.
He wrote a simpler version of MULTICS and named this attempt UNICS(Uniplexed Information and Computing System). Because memory and CPU power was at a premium in those days, UNICS used short commands to minimize the space needed to store them and the time needed to execute them.
Ken Thompson then joined with Dennis Ritchie, the author of the first 'C' compiler in 1973. They both rewrote the UNIX kernel in C. As UNIX became more popular, researchers at universities around the world started using it.
UNIX was distributed in source form, the original C code. This meant that the researchers could repair bugs, change programs, or even add functions to the operating system themselves. They would send back these changes, and over the years UNIX quickly grew to contain a large set of commands.
This was a big step forward in terms of the system's portability and released the improved editions of UNIX. The sixth edition of UNIX was introduced in 1976. The seventh edition, released in 1978, marked a split UNIX development into two main branches: SYSV and BSD(Berkeley Software Distribution).
Over the years, several companies involved in UNIX development. By the 1980s, two standards of UNIX development -AT&T and Berkeley continued in parallel.
Later AT&T and Sun joined and produced UNIX system V as it's the de-facto standard. Similarly, another standard was developed around the Berkeley Systems Distribution.
In the year 1991, a free open source UNIX OS was introduced by Linus Torvalds and named it as Linux.
Do you think UNIX OS is better than Windows:
Multitasking
UNIX is a multitasking operating system that allows multiple programs to execute concurrently. It allows you to initiate more than one task from the same terminal in such a way that one task is performed as a foreground and another task as a background process. In this way, you can switch to some other task without having to wait for the current task to finish.
Multi-User
UNIX operating system supports more than one user to access computer resources like a hard disk, main memory, tape drives, etc. Multiple users can log on to the system from different terminals and run separate jobs that share the resources of a common terminal. This feature of UNIX deals with the principle of time-sharing.
The job of time sharing is done by a scheduler that divides the CPU time into several segments and each segment is assigned to each user on a scheduled basis. Each segment of time is called a time slice. This time slice is extremely small, when this is expired, it passes control to the next user on the system. Each user executes his/her set of instructions within his/ her slice.
Portability
This is one of the main features of UNIX for this Universal popularity. Portability makes the UNIX work on different types of machines and platforms with the easy transfer of code to any computer system. Since a major portion of UNIX is written in C language and only a small portion is coded in assembly language for specific hardware, UNIX became popular for all systems.
File Security and Protection
Being a multi-user system, UNIX makes special consideration for file and system security. UNIX has different levels of security using assigning user name and password to individual user ensuring the authentication, at the file level providing file access permissions viz. Read, write execute, and lastly the file encryption to change the file into an unreadable format.
Command Structure
UNIX commands are easy to understand and simple to use. For example, the 'cp' command is used to copy a file, the 'my' command is used to move a file and the 'date' command is used to check the system date. While working in a UNIX environment, it should be noted that the UNIX commands are case sensitive and are entered in lower case.
Communication
In UNIX, communication is an excellent feature that enables different users to communicate is an excellent feature that enables different users to communicate within networks. There is also a provision for interactive conversations among different users.
In the UNIX environment, there is a variety of communication facilities provided using the 'write' command, 'mail' command, 'talk' command,d, and 'wall' command. On UNIX machines, you can perform online communication using two ways. The first one is using the 'talk' command.
The 'talk' is a two-way- real-time communication program that allows you to communicate with another user by trying character by character. The other method of real-time communication is the 'write' command. This command will send a one-way message.
Accounting
UNIX keeps an account of jobs created by the user. This feature of UNIX enhances the system performance in terms of CPU monitoring and disk space checking etc. UNIX allows you to keep an account of disk space used by each user and the disk quota. These accounting tasks can be performed by the root user using various commands like a quota, df, du, etc.
UNIX Tools
UNIX supports various types of tools and utilities to provide a comfortable working environment. Some of the general-purpose tools are compiler interpreters, network applications, and system administration tools, etc. Various types of utilities in UNIX are 'grep', 'sed', 'awk' etc. Called text manipulation utilities. UNIX system's utilities also include server programs called daemons which provide remote network and administration services.
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