The UNIX operating system, its features and history

The UNIX operating system was developed in the 60’s and 70’s by a group of AT & T employees at Bell Labs.  Unix is used by both servers and workstations and is the basis for a wide variety of other operating systems.

UNIX is sometimes very text based. Windows Vista is very different.   Improve the look of your Microsoft Vista PC with Windows Vista high quality animated wallpapers and discuss animated wallpapers in the forum

The operating system under UNIX consists of many of the utilities listed above along with the master control program, which is called the “kernel”.  The kernel helps start and stop programs, handle the file system, take care of other common high level tasks that most programs share and schedule access to hardware to avoid conflicts if two programs try to access the same resource or device simultaneously.

Besides the main kernel, UNIX systems also had micro-kernels that tried to reverse the growing size of kernels and return to a system in which most tasks were completed by smaller utilities.

In an era where a “normal” computer consisted of a hard disk for storage and a data terminal for input and output, the UNIX file model worked quite well as most input/output was linear.  However, modern systems include networking and other new devices.

Describing a graphical user interface driven by mouse control in an “event driven” fashion didn’t work well under the old model.  Work on systems supporting these new devices in the 1980’s led to facilities for non-blocking input/output forms of inter-process communications other than just pipes, as well as moving functionality such as network protocols out of the kernel.

Just as with other operating systems, the programming was updated periodically to add other features and to streamline processes that the system would run.  Ironically, the importance of the UNIX system is quite far-reaching.  In fact, some experts call it the most important system you’ll never use.

Internet servers and database servers mostly use UNIX. 
It is a very efficient multi-user; multi-tasking operating system traditionally used by large companies, educational institutions and general tech people.

It is scalable from a small system right up to a mainframe-class system (all you need to do is add extra hardware), which makes it suitable for anyone looking for a low cost, reliable operating system. 

For programmers it has a wonderful set of built-in utilities, a programmable shell (command/user interface) and a straightforward structure that makes it very easy to quickly produce quite complex programs.  For end users, UNIX has a friendly graphical interface (called X Windows) and many business applications and games.

As we said, UNIX is used as a basis for other operating systems.  One of those is Linux. 

Protect your operating system from with a free remove spy ware software download.  Always assign users correct level of privilege to protect your OS from key stroke sniffing software and viruses. Read up on UNIX computer security before choosing to purchase costly UNIX software applications.  Squidoo UNIX software resources may also help you look after your UNIX server or client machine.  Consider a UNIX server with Bluetooth Wireless Technology or 3d animation software.