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Unix for Not Yet Techies"Computer Careers: The Last Operating System You'll Ever Need to Learn at a High Tech Job?"by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career |
UNIX was the first portable operating systemUNIX answered a need for a uniform operating systems for computers, which many IT pros did not even know they needed, until it was available. UNIX is well loved by many IT pros even today. This is difficult for us to understand now, but back in the prehistoric, pre- UNIX days of computing, people with computer careers considered hardware more important than software. Every computer sold had its own proprietary operating system and software had to be written exclusively for it. Not only that, these operating systems were written in assembly language, which is mind-numbing for most human beings. UNIX began life in 1969 in The Bell Laboratories, which realized the inadequacies of that system. They had 3 goals for the new operating system: 1. Make it simple and elegant. 2. Make it a high level language. 3. Allow the re-use of code. Ken Thompson and colleagues on this computer job wrote a small core of UNIX, called a kernel, in assembly language. Then they used a new high level programming language called C to write the rest of Unix. Later, they went back and re-wrote the kernel in C. C has been used to add features ever since. In great contrast to every other operating system of that time, UNIX was designed to be portableThat is, UNIX could installed on any brand of computer. Remember that in those days that meant mainframe computers. In 1974 ATT began distributing it to colleges and universities. It could not sell it because it's "real" business was being the telephone monopoly. Therefore, use of UNIX was spread across academia and many computer science students learned to use it, which eventually helped increase its popularity in the 80s. Since these students already knew it, a company using it could hire immediately functional programmers and systems administrators. This was a novel concept. When every major company had its own unique, proprietary software, every major company had to spend lots of money training programmers on the computer job to use that unique, proprietary software. Some people learned UNIX then with the expectation that it would be the last operating system they would ever have to learn. However, this did lead to divergences in the software, because the students didn't just learn to use it, they learned to hack into it and change it. Although the core of it always remained the same, a large number of variations eventually appeared. In 1978 ATT announced that it would begin charging for use of the operating systemIn response, the University of California in Berkeley announced that it would charge for its version of the UNIX system. Their students had made the greatest number of improvements and other changes to the system, and the BSD version of it became one of the most popular. It has the advantages of being stable, of handling memory well and of handling large files. Its open source child, Linux, inherited these virtues from it. One disadvantage to it is that everybody agrees that it was never designed to be "user friendly" to casual computer usersAll serious and experienced computer pros love it. The rest of us . . . . It actually has several user interfaces or command processors, called for some reason shells. The Bourne shell is the most well known and common. Related to Bourne is the Korn and C shells. Lately, people have been trying to add a graphical user interface (a la Windows) on top of the basic shell, but nobody yet claims it's as easy as Windows. Since ATT and U of C at Berkeley are now out of the UNIX computer career business, there is no central control and its future is uncertain. It could be overtaken by Windows NT. Next: Linux |
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Permission is granted to reprint the above article in an ezine or on a website as long as it is reprinted in full, with no changes, with full credit and with this contact information and link included at the bottom. All other rights reserved. Copyright 2007 by Info Ring Press All Rights Reserved. Computer Careers (Home) Sitemap Contact Privacy Info Ring Press Richard Stooker PO Box 617 130-G Ballwin Manor Dr Ballwin, MO 63011 (636) 394-2052 rick@inforingpress.com |