31 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
31 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
# Unix
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Unix is a highly influential operating system created in 1969 in Bell Labs by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson after they
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stopped working in [Multics](multics.md), which got too [bloated](bloated), big and expensive, so Bell Labs pulled out of it. Latter on other
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programmers that worked in Multics joined Unix. Nowadays the "Unix" name is used as a generic name to refer to the family
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of Unix-like operating systems.
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Unlike Multics, which was developed for a big and powerful mainframe for the time, Unix was developed initially in an PDP-7 that was lying around
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as a way to run a video game written by Thompson, *Space Travel* which was originally written for the GE 635 mainframe running Multics .
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Fortunately in an excellent timing, his wife went on vacation leaving him a month free (Turns out he only needed 2 weeks). Later they
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convinced management to get a more powerful PDP-11 in which Unix development continued.
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Unix also spawned the [Unix philosophy](unix_philosophy.md) which in basic terms states that a program should do a single thing
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and do it well, promoting modularity (by using [pipes](pipe.md) as [IPC](ipc.md)) in contrast to monolithic programs found in other
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OSes in the time (like Multics) and also in "modern" OSes like Windows, favouring the use of text over binary data and following
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the [KISS](kiss.md) design principle.
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Unix was exclusively written in PDP-11 assembly up version 4 when [C](c.md) was created and the OS and its tools began to be rewritten in C.
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In 1979 the seventh edition of Research Unix was released, being the first edition to be fully portable. (last good research Unix version?)
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[BSD](bsd.md) was forked from this version.
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A PDP-11 emulator running Unix Version 6 online can be found here: <https://pdp11.aiju.de/>.
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## Some Unix-like operating systems
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- [BSDs](bsd.md)
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- [Linux](linux.md)
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- [Minix](minix.md): a [microkernel](microkernel.md)-based OS by Andrew Tannenbaum
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- [Hurd](hurd.md): GNU's kernel, microkernel design based on Mach.
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- [Plan 9](plan9.md): successor of Research Unix.
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- MacOS: Apple's OS, built on stolen code from FreeBSD, proprietary.
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- ...
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