UNIX: Difference between revisions

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{{quote|"It's a UNIX system! I know this!"|'''Lex''', ''[[Jurassic Park]]''}}

Quirky, often ~~counterintuitive~~, but incredibly flexible, UNIX has gone from a little-known research operating system in the 1970s to an entire design philosophy. In its experimental days, UNIX stood in the background, influencing OSes but not making much noise on its own; that changed starting in the mid-1980s, when the first commercial UNIX products appeared, and exploded in the mid-1990s, as OSes either based directly on UNIX or following its principles came to the forefront via the World Wide Web.

Quirky, often counter-intuitive, but incredibly flexible, UNIX has gone from a little-known research operating system in the 1970s to an entire design philosophy. In its experimental days, UNIX stood in the background, influencing OSes but not making much noise on its own; that changed starting in the mid-1980s, when the first commercial UNIX products appeared, and exploded in the mid-1990s, as OSes either based directly on UNIX or following its principles came to the forefront via the World Wide Web.

UNIX was once considered unfriendly, terse and somewhat elitist, requiring expensive licensing and large, expensive minicomputers to run; now, almost all of UNIX's source code is freely licensed, and UNIX derivatives can be found on things as small as a smart phone <ref>three of the four major smart phone OSes -- Apple iOS, Google Android and HP/Palm webOS -- are UNIX variants</ref>, or as large as an IBM mainframe. It's also probably the only OS that came into existence specifically because a bored programmer wanted to play a game.

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Now, in 2012, UNIX and its clones and derivatives are more popular than ever. Apple decided to open-source the kernel and user tools for Darwin, the basis of Mac OS X, and even Solaris, one of the last bastions of old-school commercial UNIX, has since been opened up. Various PC-centric distributions of Linux are giving Microsoft a run for its money for the first time in years, especially on low-end PCs that can't run Vista or 7, and a resurgent Mac (running UNIX itself) is competing with Microsoft on the high end. The BSDs are popular in server, networking and security-related applications. Ubuntu, a distribution of Linux, is quite popular with computer-savvy people who appreciate its ease of use and its excellent hardware support, and is even starting to dent the average userdom. There are also several forks of the official Linux kernel being used on high-end electronic devices and smartphones, as well as in networking gear like Ethernet switches and routers, and in many embedded devices. In the coming decade UNIX systems are likely to spread further into the consumer desktop environment as Microsoft prepares to bring the Windows product line to an end.

The rise of small, simple, low-cost, low-power "netbooks"--basic laptop computers for $300 or less geared towards Internet functionality at the expense of gaming and multimedia--has also worked in UNIX's favor. Many netbooks have discarded the traditional x86 architecture due to power consumption and cost concerns in favor of the Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) architecture, also used by the vast majority of embedded devices such as cell phones. The only version of Microsoft Windows for ARM processors is the largely incompatible "Windows CE" (Microsoft has shown Windows 8 [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20026429-64.html working on ARM], however), and the vast majority of ARM netbooks run some version of UNIX, usually Linux. While ARM is currently used on only a small proportion of netbooks, its share is growing, and one manufacturer believes that ARM machines will control 50% of the netbook market by 2012. Existing Windows netbooks often still run Windows XP, which is now a full ~~two~~ generations out of date, as netbooks' low-performance hardware simply cannot cope with the demands of Windows Vista, although more and more netbooks are now coming with a stripped-down version of Windows 7 called "Windows 7 Starter".

The rise of small, simple, low-cost, low-power "netbooks"--basic laptop computers for $300 or less geared towards Internet functionality at the expense of gaming and multimedia--has also worked in UNIX's favor. Many netbooks have discarded the traditional x86 architecture due to power consumption and cost concerns in favor of the Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) architecture, also used by the vast majority of embedded devices such as cell phones. The only version of Microsoft Windows for ARM processors is the largely incompatible "Windows CE" (Microsoft has shown Windows 8 [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20026429-64.html working on ARM], however), and the vast majority of ARM netbooks run some version of UNIX, usually Linux. While ARM is currently used on only a small proportion of netbooks, its share is growing, and one manufacturer believes that ARM machines will control 50% of the netbook market by 2012. Existing Windows netbooks often still run Windows XP, which is now a full three generations out of date, as netbooks' low-performance hardware simply cannot cope with the demands of Windows Vista, although more and more netbooks are now coming with a stripped-down version of Windows 7 called "Windows 7 Starter".

In addition to netbooks, other portable devices nowadays often contain some code from UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems; Apple's iOS, used on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, contains code from the Darwin base of [[Mac OS]] X and iOS's main competitor, Google's Android operating system, contains a fork of the Linux kernel at its core.

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