UNIX

An influential operating system created in the Bell Laboratories of USA based phone giant AT&T in the early 70's. Initially created as a minimalist version of MULTICS, it was later in the decade marketed by AT&T as an "easier to use alternative" to common minicomputer operating systems, which became something of a running joke in the computer industry as even by then UNIX had become considerably more complex than the common such systems. Marketing during that time was also hampered by a reputation that the system had for unreliability.

The company tried during the 80's to market the system as a microcomputer OS, initially as a single user system by licensing Release 7 to Microsoft that created a subset of UNIX called XENIX that they then sub-licensed to microcomputer manufactures, later in the decade the company tried to market a line of computers developed by Italian company Olivetti, both as single user alternatives to PC's and as budget multi user servers, but this was a relative but not complete failure in the marketplace.

The UNIX business was sold to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in 1995 and at the same time the ownership of the trademark was transferred to industry association The Open Group.

When talking about more than one version of UNIX derived system it is customary to use the term Unices, while if you talk about UNIX compatible system like Linux and FreeBSD it is customary to talk about UNIX like systems.

Porting issues

See: Porting from Unix platforms

Operating systems based on UNIX

• AIX
• Apple A/UX
• Atari System V UNIX
• AT&T UNIX
• HP-UX
• INTERACTIVE UNIX
• Microport System V
• SCO UNIX (aka OpenServer)
• Solaris
  • OpenSolaris
    • Illumos
• UniSoft UniPlus
• XENIX

UNIX clones

• Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)
  • MORE/BSD (HP 68k Workstations)
  • SunOS
  • 386BSD - Historical - Used as the basis for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD
    • FreeBSD
      • AskoziaPBX (Defunct)
      • PacBSD (aka archBSD - Defunct)
    • NetBSD
      • EdgeBSD
      • OpenBSD
        • Bitrig
• Coherent
• Linux
  • Debian
    • Ubuntu
  • ELKS
• Minix
• UZI
  • FuzixOS
  • UZIX
  • UZI180
  • UZI280

Operating systems with UNIX style userland

• EUMEL (Ux userland optional)
  • L2
  • L3
  • L4
• OS-9
• QNX

Links

• UNIX at the Open Group - The current owner of the UNIX tradmark and some of the code.
• Tenox.net's cache of old UNIX docs - Includes lots of vintage UNIX and XENIX documentation in PDF format.

Publications

• Brian W Kernighan and Rob Pike: The Unix Programming Enviroment - 1984

See also

Shell script