Unix Was a Core Building Part for the Existing Internet

Ken Thompson, a programmer at AT&T Bell Laboratories, in 1969 has started to write the first version of UNIX, an operating system for interactive use, and from that year on he continued to work at its developing for several years with the aid of his colleagues, trying to obtain then an OS that was working on the “less is more” principle. Thompson and his colleagues wanted to develop a system having characteristics of cheap to get, simple, elegant and ease to use. So, what was there more to be desired, since the system reached its apex of utilization in every area that required the use of computers? Not ot mention the fact that the new model of Unix determined many software designers to redefine their perspective in regard to programming.

In years, the system suffered many changing, such as rewriting the system in C language which lead to increasing the OS’s portability across computing areas and along these years it gained the name Unics (Uniplexed Information and Computing Service) that later became Unix. The uniqueness of this system consisted of the fact that whenever new ideas were discovered or even suggested by others they could be easily introduced in the system and its software in a way that could develop better versions of the system.

When AT&T took control of the Unix license once the Unix Version 7 was released, they prohibited its use in the Universities, thus determining professor Andrew Tanenbaum from Amsterdam Vrije University to write a clone of Unix for his classes, the OS being named Minix to run it on the Intel 80286 microprocessor. This system will later become the starting point for the creation of Linux. Before this modifications were also brought by the UC Berkeley programmer Bill Joy to obtain a branch of the Unix OS, called BSD – Berkeley Software Distribution.

Today Unix has two major versions: one coming directly from AT&T and the other one coming from Berkeley California, with the system’s strongest branches AIX belonging to IBM, HP-UX from Hewlett-Packard and Solaris that belongs to Sun Microsystems. Due to the constant new demands on computing market the portability designed many years ago of the Unix is lacking completeness, this fact prompting IT organizations to move away from Unix and incline more towards Linux which is seen as being more strategic in choice.

But as a Computerworld survey noticed, this will not happen too soon, considering that 88% of the respondents are still relying on Unix as their essential platform, whereas only 12% declared that they will move away from Unix, saying that the main reason would be cost savings. Another reason would be the trends offered by the x86 processor commodity – virtualization on x86, cloud computing, clustering – all these combined lead to other choices of operating systems, such as Linux and Windows.

No matter what will turn out to be the fate of Unix, this operating system is still considered to be the parent of a long list of popular software, influencing systems, enabling several of start-ups to be successful by offering low-cost platform to build on. Unix was a core building part for the existing Internet being at the same time responsible for the telecommunication systems of today and no one can ever contest its importance in the development of the operating systems.