X-Nico

45 unusual facts about UNIX


ABC notation

Such software is readily available for most computer systems including Microsoft Windows, Unix/Linux, Macintosh, PalmOS, and web-based.

Architecture of Windows NT

This is distinct from the concept of a "service process", which is a user mode component somewhat analogous to a daemon in Unix-like operating systems.

Ashish Gulhati

His articles and columns in PCQuest and Dataquest magazines in 1993 and 1994 were among the first in the mainstream Indian computing press to inform thousands of readers about alternative operating systems, Unix, Linux, open-source software, Email, the Internet and the World Wide Web, years before Internet access was commercially available in India.

Bob Fabry

Bob Fabry, while a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, conceived of the idea of obtaining DARPA funding for a radically improved version of AT&T Unix and started the Computer Systems Research Group.

Callan Data Systems

UNIX V7 was originally ported to the Unistars, and later UNIX System V, all the Uniplus ports provided by UniSoft.

Cray Time Sharing System

Some controversy existed at LASL with the first attempt to develop an operating system for the Cray-1 named DEIMOS, a message-passing, Unix-like operating system, by Forrest Basket.

Darl McBride

On March 7, 2003, during McBride's tenure as CEO of the company, The SCO Group initiated litigation (SCO v. IBM) against IBM, alleging breach of contract and copyright infringement claims connected to Unix.

Delete key

On Unix-like systems, the delete key is usually mapped to ESC3~ which is the VT220 escape code for the "delete character" key.

Dhrystone

Dhrystone was published in Ada, with the C version for Unix developed by Rick Richardson ("version 1.1") greatly contributing to its popularity.

DirectFB

The library allows developers an alternative to a full X Window System (X11) server used in Unix-like operating systems.

DNIX

DNIX (original spelling: D-Nix) was a Unix-like real-time operating system from the Swedish company Dataindustrier AB (DIAB).

Edinburgh Multiple Access System

Such features lead EMAS supporters to claim that their system was superior to Unix for the first 20 years of the latter's existence.

Edit mask

Aspect of command called user mask, allowing "masked" computer users to have write access on some shared resources in Unix and Linux

Evi Nemeth

While at CU-Boulder, Nemeth was well known for her undergraduate systems administration activity, in which students over the years had the opportunity to develop in-depth knowledge and skills in Unix system administration.

Gentoo/FreeBSD

Gentoo/FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system developed by Gentoo Linux developers in order to bring Gentoo Linux design, structure, and tools such as Portage and the Gentoo Linux base layout to the FreeBSD operating system.

Geoff Collyer

In the past he worked as a Unix system programmer, but since 1994 he has been living on and developing Plan 9.

GNO/ME

The GNO Multitasking Environment, also known as GNO/ME or GNO for short, is a Unix-like operating system for the Apple IIGS computer.

Ixemul.library

It allows software for Unix-like platforms to be easily compiled on Amiga systems with minimal source code modification.

Jack Dennis

Multics was not fully successful as a commercial project, but it was important because it influenced the design of many other computer operating systems, including inspiration for Ken Thompson to design Unix.

Landmark Graphics Corporation

However with the advent of cheap Unix-based workstations from other manufacturers over the next decade, it ported the software to their versions of Unix and dropped the hardware side of the business.

Mac OS X v10.0

Mac OS X introduced the new Darwin Unix-like core and a totally new system of memory management.

Mac OS X v10.2

CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), the modular printing system for Unix-like operating systems.

MicroStation

The latest versions of the software are released solely for Microsoft Windows operating systems, but historically MicroStation was available for Macintosh platforms and a number of Unix-like operating systems.

Modules Environment

The Environment Modules system is a tool to help users manage their Unix or Linux shell environment, by allowing groups of related environment-variable settings to be made or removed dynamically.

Murray Haszard

Haszard expanded his company with an extra support programmer, but B32 continued to grow and was ported to the Unix operating system.

NBench

Independently of BYTE, in 1996 NBench was ported to Linux and other flavors of Unix by Uwe F. Mayer.

Netatalk

It allows Unix-like operating systems to serve as file, print and time servers for Macintosh computers.

Netpbm

It is included in all major open source Unix-like operating system distributions and also works on other Unix-like operating systems, Windows, Mac OS X, and other platforms.

Option key

However, the Option key in a Mac operating system functions differently from the Alt key under other Unix-like systems or Microsoft Windows.

OS/8

The basic OS and CCL implemented many rather sophisticated commands, many of which still do not exist in modern command languages, not even in MS-DOS, Windows, or Unix-like operating systems.

PGPLOT

It is known to run on many operating systems, including most Unix-like systems, Mac OS, and Microsoft Windows.

Phantom OS

Phantom OS is one of a few OSes that are not based on classical concepts of Unix-like systems.

Principles of Compiler Design

The acknowledgments mention that the book was entirely typeset at Bell Labs using troff on the Unix operating system, which at that time had been little seen outside the Labs.

Red Hat v. SCO

SCO replied with both a press release and two letters to Red Hat on the same day; their claims are reiterated in the press release ("Linux includes source code that is a verbatim copy of UNIX and carries with it no warranty or indemnification. SCO's claims are true and we look forward to proving them in court."), and the allegations made by Red Hat are denied ("SCO has not been trying to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt to end users.").

Robot Operating System

The library is geared toward a Unix-like system (Ubuntu Linux is listed as 'supported' while other variants such as Fedora and Mac OS X are considered 'experimental').

Scott Seebass

Mr. Seebass went on to work at Interactive Systems and MT Xinu, where he focused on developing MORE/bsd, a commercial version of Unix.

The Institute for End User Computing

Its coordinating goal is to develop a new open source platform that is a simple, yet state of the art alternative to Windows, Unix, Linux, and the Mac OS.

Unics

Unix, originally Unics, computer operating system software

Unit Control Block

A similar concept in Unix-like systems is a kernel's devinfo structure, addressed by a combination of major and minor number through a device node.

UNIX/32V

Marshall Kirk McKusick and George V. Neville-Neil, The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004), ISBN 0-201-70245-2, pp.

USIX

USIX is a Unix-like computer operating system that was created by System Six Inc., and Russia's INEUM (INstitut Elektronnykh Upravlyaushikh Mashin Institute of Electronic Control Machines, one of the leading software R&D organizations of the Soviet Union).

Walnut Creek CDROM

Walnut Creek developed a close relationship with the FreeBSD Unix-like open source operating system project from its inception in 1993.

XPaint

XPaint (alternatively capitalized Xpaint) is a free open source image editing program for bitmap images on the X Window environment on Unix-like operating systems.

Xzgv

xzgv is a simple, small software utility that can be used for viewing digital images or pictures of several formats, e.g., jpeg, GIF, PNG, etc. xzgv is used on computers using a Unix-like operating system and the X Window System.

Zeus Technology

Zeus' original product, first released in 1995, was Zeus Web Server which became known as one of the highest-performance web servers for Unix and Unix-like platforms.


Backslash

In many programming languages such as C, Perl, and PHP and in Unix scripting languages, the backslash is used to indicate that the character following it should be treated specially (if it would otherwise be treated normally), or normally (if it would otherwise be treated specially).

Berkeley sockets

Only in 1989, however, could UC Berkeley release versions of its operating system and networking library free from the licensing constraints of AT&T Corporation's proprietary Unix.

Brooke C. Wells

On March 3, 2003, SCO Group filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against IBM for allegedly devaluing its version of the Linux operating system and breaching its obligations under various UNIX licensing agreements.

Computer Systems Research Group

The group was disbanded in 1995, though not without leaving a legacy - 386BSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are all based on the 4.4BSD-Lite distribution and continue to play an important role in the open-source UNIX community today, including dictating the style of C programming used via KNF in the style man page.

Craft access system

The developer, Muchiri Motilewa, designed and coded the proof-of-concept prototype on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 computer in BASIC and a DEC VAX-11/780 Unix machine in C and Shell.

Data Access Language

However, like any server software on the "classic" Mac OS, Butler was seriously hampered by the Mac's single-user file system and limited multitasking and could never really deliver the sort of performance the same server would have on Windows NT or Unix.

Empire Classic

Peter Langston's 1971 version was developed while he was on staff at Harvard University using Bell Labs UNIX and the C programming language on a PDP 11/45.

Fsc2

fsc2 is well documented; the documentation with more than 350 pages in HTML, info, PostScript and PDF format is part of the package, covering all aspects of fsc2, i.e. the graphical interface, the EDL language, device functions and the writing of new device modules etc.

HeliOS

Others include the keyboard, mouse, RS232 and Centronics servers (built into the host I/O server), the null server (like Unix's /dev/null), and the logger server (like Unix's syslog).

IGUANA Computing

Independent Group of Unix-Alikes and Networking Activists (IGUANA) are developers of the Wombat system.

Jurix

There is no indication if the name was in any way related to the nearby Dutch law and IT organisation JURIX or rather just a portmanteau between "Jura" and "Unix"/"Linux".

KMPlayer

Konqueror Media Player, an open-source media player software for KDE that runs on Unix-like operating systems

KSH

Korn shell, a Unix shell developed by David Korn in the early 1980s

Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code

Various Unix people, particularly Peter H. Salus, Dennis Ritchie and Berny Goodheart, lobbied Unix's various owners (AT&T, Novell, the Santa Cruz Operation) for many years to allow the book to be published officially.

Mirapoint Email Appliance

Mirapoint Email Appliance is a Unix-like standards-compliant black-box e-mail server, with built-in anti-spam, anti-virus, webmail, POP, IMAP, calendar, and LDAP routing options available.

MKS X/Server

MKS X/Server is for a commercial X server product for accessing Unix/Linux systems from a PC, developed by MKS Inc..

Plain text

Many other computer programs are also capable of processing or creating plain text, such as countless commands in DOS, Windows, Mac OS, and Unix and its kin; as well as web browsers (a few browsers such as Lynx and the Line Mode Browser produce only plain text for display).

PRONOM

Unix magic numbers and Macintosh data forks do provide some of this functionality, but the same is not true within DOS or Microsoft Windows environments.

Redirector

COM port redirector, for Windows operating systems relay serial data between a "virtual" COM port and a serial device server or modem server on a network; TTY redirectors perform the same function for UNIX/Linux operating systems

Resolv.conf

In most Unix-like operating systems and others that implement the BIND Domain Name System (DNS) resolver library, the resolv.conf configuration file contains information that determines the operational parameters of the DNS resolver.

Return statement

In Windows PowerShell all evaluated expressions which are not captured (e.g., assigned to a variable, cast to void or piped to $null) are returned from the subroutine as elements in an array, or as a single object in the case that only one object has not been captured.

Roff

It was a Unix version of the runoff text-formatting program from Multics, which was a descendant of RUNOFF for CTSS (the first computerized text-formatting application).

SCO OpenServer

Based on SCO UNIX 3.2v4, SCO OpenServer 5 would become SCO's primary product and serve as the basis for products like PizzaNet (the first Internet-based food delivery system done in partnership with Pizza Hut) and Global Access (the first commercially licensed and bundled Internet Operating System).

SINIX

SINIX (later renamed to Reliant UNIX) was a variant of the Unix operating system from Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme.

Following X/Open's acceptance that its requirements for the use of the UNIX trademark were met, version 5.44 and subsequent releases were published as Reliant UNIX by Fujitsu Siemens Computers.

Source Code Control System

Apart from fixing some Year 2000 problems in 1999, there is no active development on the various UNIX vendor specific SCCS versions.

Starlink Project

Between 1992 and 1995 the project switched to UNIX (and switched the networking to TCP/IP), supporting Digital UNIX on Alpha-based systems, and Solaris on systems from Sun Microsystems.

Tersus

Both the Studio and the Server are available on a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS X.

The Art of Unix Programming

The author utilizes a comparative approach to explaining Unix by contrasting it to other operating systems including desktop-oriented ones such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS to ones with research roots such as EROS and Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

The Home Computer Advanced Course

Subjects included computer applications, computer hardware and software technology, concepts in computer science, practical electronics projects, BASIC and machine code programming, other programming languages, operating systems (including MS-DOS and UNIX), and a jargon dictionary.

The Unix System

The Unix System (ISBN 0-201-13791-7) is a book by Stephen R. Bourne; it was the first widely available general introduction to the Unix operating system.

The Wollongong Group

Eunice - A UNIX emulator for the VAX VMS operating system (based on software written by David Kashtan at SRI)

Notable Wollongong technical staff that worked on these projects include David H. Crocker (Email), Dr. Marshall Rose (SNMP), Karl Auerbach (Netbios, SNMP), Narayan Mohanram (TCP/IP on UNIX), Jerry Scott (TCP/IP on VMS), Leo McLaughlin III and John Bartas (TCP/IP on IBM PC).

Trading room

Born during the same period, they share many technical features, such as a three-tier architecture, whose back-end runs on a Unix platform, a relational database on either Sybase or Oracle, and a graphical user interface written in English, since their clients are anywhere in the world.

Ultrix

Absolutely key to bringing Unix to inside the company, DEC's Unix Engineering Group (UEG) was started by Bill Munson with Jerry Brenner and Fred Canter, both from DEC's premier Customer Service Engineering group, Bill Shannon (from Case Western Reserve University), and Armando Stettner (from Bell Labs).

Unix wars

Since then, occasional bursts of Unix factionalism have broken out, such as the HP/SCO "3DA" alliance in 1995, and Project Monterey in 1998, a teaming of IBM, SCO, Sequent and Intel which was followed by litigation (SCO v. IBM) between IBM and the new SCO, formerly Caldera.

Xitami

Xitami was designed to be portable, and was ported to Windows, Linux and other Unices, OpenVMS, BeOS, and OS/2.