What is Unix?
- UNIX is the operating system which Athena runs on.
- It was developed at AT & T Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis
Ritchie starting in 1969. Its name is a word play on MULTICS, a popular operating system of
the time.
- UNIX supports multiple users, multiple tasks, networking, interprocess
communication, a hierarchical file system ...
- UNIX is highly portable because over 90 % of its code is written in C.
- UNIX now comes in thousands of flavors, most of them descendents of
either A T & T's System V or Berkeley Software Distribution 4.2 (4.2BSD).
[Ken Thompson was a visiting professor at Berkeley in the 70's and took
UNIX with him.]
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