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An operating system, the inspiration behind
much modern software and the code on which the internet was originally
built. Unix was invented by Ken Thompson at AT&T's Bell Labs in 1969, and
its original purpose was apparently to provide a way for its author to play
games on his computer. It quickly turned into an enormously powerful and
secure system capable of supporting big networks and now has users ranging
from small academic institutions to huge isps.
This
transformation of Unix can be largely ascribed to its continued development
and fine-tuning by many different groups of people. At&t's
decision to release the source code universities ensured that the
system influenced lots of up-and-coming computer scientists and developers,
whose freedom to tinker with the innards had both good and bad results. On
the positive side, Unix has become a flexible and open development
environment in which programmers can create powerful programs that do
particular jobs extremely well. The prowess of some Unix tools, such as the
emacs text processor, is legendary. So influential was Unix that some
of its elements can even be seen in the design of comparatively trivial
operating systems such as Microsoft's dos and windows.
Less positively, Unix has struggled to shake off its hacker
image and is still too difficult for ordinary folk to use in everyday
computing. This has not been helped by the fragmentation of the system into
competing flavours. Despite efforts by sun Microsystems, sco (Santa
Cruz Operation, a software company) and others to create friendlier versions
of Unix that smooth over its many complexities and inconsistencies, the
software has not been widely adopted by companies and has lost a great deal
of ground to Microsoft's windows.
Alight at the end of the tunnel is linux, a cousin of Unix,
which has captured the imagination of the business world in a way that
mainstream Unix quite managed. As Sun focuses the bulk of its attention on
Java, linux may yet be the software that keeps the Unix spirit alive and in
circulation on the internet. |
