| UNIX-like systems include the traditional vendor systems such as Solaris and HP-UX; the Linux-based distributions such as Red Hat, Debian, Suse, and Slackware; and the BSD-based distributions such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin. They run on computers ranging from laptops to the largest supercomputers. They are the operating system of choice for most multiprocessor, graphics, and vector-processing systems, and are widely used for the original purpose of timesharing. The most common platform for providing network services (from FTP to WWW) on the Internet, they are collectively the most portable operating system ever developed. This portability is due partly to their implementation language, C [Kernighan & Ritchie, 1989] (which is itself a widely ported language), and partly to the elegant design of the system. Since its inception in 1969 [Ritchie & Thompson, 1978], the UNIX system has developed in several divergent and rejoining streams. The original developers continued to advance the state of the art with their Ninth and Tenth Edition UNIX inside AT&T Bell Laboratories, and then their Plan 9 successor to UNIX. Meanwhile, AT&T licensed UNIX System V as a product before selling it to Novell. Novell passed the UNIX trademark to X/OPEN and sold the source code and distribution rights to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). Both System V and Ninth Edition UNIX were strongly influenced by the Berkeley Software Distributions produced by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California at Berkeley. The Linux operating system, although developed independently of the other UNIX variants, implements the UNIX interface. Thus, applications developed to run on other UNIX-based platforms can be easily ported to run on Linux. |
