Unix

Unix is an operating system. More than an operating system, it is a family of operating systems. The most famous Unix-like operating system is GNU/Linux but there are a lot of them, like FreeBSD, Ultrix, HP-UX... They all have the same architecture, they use the same principles but implementations are different.

The first Unix operating system was designed in 1969 by Ken Thompson in the Bell laboratories. At the beginning, this system was far from being what it is nowadays: it was a single user platform (hence its name).

Soon after, D. Ritchie, one of the creator of the C language, joined the team and so the system is entirely rewritten in C (actually, only start sequences are still written in assembler).

The first version available on the market place was a version released in 1975; it was the version number 6. In 1983 AT&T released its own version known as System V. For a while, before becoming the most common system, this version was competing with the version released by the California University (the famous BSD).

Main Unix systems characteristics are the following:

• they work around a kernel,
• stability,
• multi-user systems,
• designed to (perfectly) work on networks.

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Most common Unix commands    cron and crontab    vi    rm

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