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History of UNIX

History of UNIX. Fergus Toolan Intelligent Information Retrieval Group University College Dublin. Administration. Practical Attendance. Practical Web Site http://ftoolan.ucd.ie/unix/ Lecture Notes Also available at web site. Overview. UNIX/LINUX/SOLARIS

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History of UNIX

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  1. History of UNIX Fergus Toolan Intelligent Information Retrieval Group University College Dublin

  2. Administration • Practical Attendance. • Practical Web Site • http://ftoolan.ucd.ie/unix/ • Lecture Notes • Also available at web site.

  3. Overview • UNIX/LINUX/SOLARIS • Motivations for the development of UNIX. • History of the development • Reasons for its success over the years • Future developments for UNIX.

  4. Flavours • There are many ‘flavours’ of UNIX. • UNIX / LINUX / SOLARIS / ... • UNIX stable scalable OS. • Micro-kernel architecture.

  5. Linux • Originally a scaled down version of UNIX. • Now a full OS in its own right. • Developed by Linus Torvalds • Based on MINIX created by Andrew Tanenbaum.

  6. Solaris • Sun Microsystems • OS for the Sun machines. • Derivative of UNIX. • Can be off-putting for a UNIX/LINUX person as the commands are slightly different. • However if you can use 1 you can use 3.

  7. MULTICS • In the mid 60’s all computers used batch processing systems • An interactive “shell” was required by some people • Multi-tasking, multi-user systems were necessary • Bell Labs developed MULTICS in 1965.

  8. MULTICS • Bell Labs pulled out of the MULTICS project in 1969. • Progress had been slow. • Financial issues with the partners. • Bell Labs allowed the continuation of the Operating Systems Group. • Thompson/Ritchie develop UNIX.

  9. Space Traveller • Game written by Ritchie. • FORTRAN code for the GECOS system • Poor graphics on GECOS. • Thompson had access to a PDP-7 with good graphics. • No OS available to run the space traveller game.

  10. Space Traveller • UNIX developed to run Space Traveller. • Based on a design Thompson and Ritchie had sketched out on paper. • Included a file system, a process subsystem and a few basic utility programs • The name UNIX was coined by Kernighan as a pun on MULTICS.

  11. History • 1969 can be seen as the birth of UNIX. • However it was 1971 before it was implemented in an actual project in Bell. • This was on a PDP-11. • Application development then began in earnest for UNIX systems.

  12. Application Development • Thompson began to create a Fortran compiler in 1971. • However it mutated to become a compiler for a derivative of BCPL. • This language became known as B. • It was interpreted. Ritchie created a compiled version. • C was born!

  13. Operating Systems • In 1973 a momentous event occurred. • Prior to this time all operating systems had been written in assembly languages. • Hence hardware dependent. Difficult to program. • Ritchie rewrote UNIX in C in 1973. • High-Level language.

  14. Distribution • By 1977 was the year that UNIX was first ported to a non-PDP machine. • This was a landmark achievement. • UNIX is the first (and only??) truly portable OS. PC’s, Clusters, Mac, Crays,... • In 1977 there were approximately 500 installations of UNIX in the world.

  15. The split • Up to the late 1970’s Bell Labs were the only people developing the UNIX system. • Academic licences had meant that Universities were looking at it. • The fact that the OS source code was freely available meant that anyone could edit. • Countless people began to develop new utilities.

  16. The Split • When the University of California – Berkely got a copy of the UNIX OS they began to edit the kernel. • This lead to the split. By 1983 there were two flavours of UNIX. • System V – the Bell labs version • BSD – Berkely Software Distribution

  17. The Success of UNIX • By 1984 100,000 installations were in place. Why did it succeed. • Written in a high-level language – slower but... • Simple UI – interactive shell, no batch • Primitives that allow complex programs to be built. • Hierarchical File System • Consistent format for files

  18. Success of UNIX • Simple interface to peripheral devices – treats all as a file. • multi-user, multiprocess system. Each user can execute several processes at once. • Hides machine architecture. Cross platform programs could be developed.

  19. 1984 - 1991 • During this period there was little major changes made to the system kernel. Both BSD and System V remained static. • However many utilities programs were developed around the world for both systems. What would run on one would run on another.

  20. Open Source • UNIX was born in an era with little in the way of copy protection. • Hence all code for UNIX was open source. • This is beginning to change in some installations. Red-Hat Enterprise servers. • However SUSE, Fedora, Debian are still open source.

  21. Open Source • What did it mean? • anyone could edit the OS. • Most were disasters • however some were incorporated into the system. • It involves rebuilding the kernel. • Most UNIX users have strange kernel configurations.

  22. The birth of LINUX • In 1991 Linus Torvalds a graduate student in Denmark developed a system as part of his PhD work which he called LINUX. • It was a simpler variant of UNIX. • It is now the third most popular operating systems in the world after Windows and Mac.

  23. The birth of LINUX • LINUX has been implemented on many platforms and for different tasks from standard desktop use to high-level servers. • LINUX is more suited to desktop operations than UNIX which is mainly server level. • The main reason is in the utilities that have been developed.

  24. LINUX Utilities • X-Windows. • Movies, Games, Music,... • Web Browsers, E-mail clients, • Word Processing • including through star/open office the creation of Word, Excel, PPT etc.

  25. The spread of UNIX • In 2000 Apple made a major leap forward in terms of the spread of UNIX. • For the OS-X operating system (the current standard macintosh operating system) Apple based it on Free BSD UNIX. • This means that UNIX has proliferated.

  26. For naive users it looks like the old mac OS. • However underneath it is an installation of BSD 4.3 – I think!! • This means that any application for Macintosh, UNIX or LINUX can be run on it. • If we have source code even windows applications can be run on it.

  27. The spread of LINUX • Many distributions: Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, Debian,.... • Red Hat commercial company. • Enterprise level services power many servers. • Desktop ones available for free. • Now from Fedora – Linux returns to Open Source.

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