Unix

Unix is a highly-influential operating system originally created at Bell Laboratories in 1969 for DEC minicomputers, and later ported to many system architectures in a huge number of versions from AT&T and others. It name was, perhaps, intended as a parody of Multics. Among the pervasive things introduced in UNIX are the Unix time numeric timestamps counting seconds since 1970, and the C programming language (which spawned numerous other programming languages and influenced the syntax of many others). The currently-popular Linux operating system was created as an open-source "clone" of Unix. Since Linux runs a large portion of web servers, and Android is based on Linux, and iOS and OS X are based on Unix, there is a very heavy use of operating systems ultimately based on Unix.

The name Unix is trademarked, originally by AT&T and currently by industry standards group The Open Group. Only operating systems meeting that group's standards can officially call themselves "Unix", though many other systems are unofficially referred to as "Unix-like".

Links

 * Wikipedia article
 * Dilbert comic strip (1993-11-09)
 * Finding files in Unix
 * Pronunciation guide to Unix (Internet Archive copy)
 * Unix Commands and Batch Processing for the Reluctant Librarian or Archivist
 * An introduction to Unix
 * Command Line Bootcamp (tutorial that lets you try Unix commands in your browser)