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AT&T Unix

The original Unix was AT&T Unix, which began at Bell LABS in the late ’60s and early’ 70s. So this is OG and it’s not even open source. It’s proprietary. AT&T licensed Unix to various parties in the 1970s, which led to different Unix variants such as UC Berkeley’s BSD, Sun’s Solaris, IBM’s AIX, and so on.

UNIX ®

Now, UNIX in all caps, which was a trademark owned by AT&T until the ’90s. And then it sold it to Novell, and Novell sold their Unix business Group to somebody else, but then they retained the rights and it ended up in the Open Group, which is like a consortium of different entities. Don’t know if they still have it or what. So UNIX in all caps – that’s the trademark of UNIX. Of course, there were legal disputes along the way, but none of them were fun.

GNU

Back in the 1980s, the GNU Project was started to create a freeware Unix system. You’ve probably heard of GNU. It stands for “GNU is not Unix”. It’s not Unix, but it’s Unix-like and it’s known for a lot of things. (Not just the invention of recursive acronyms, which are very popular and copied over and over again.)

What else can GNU do? In the GPL (GNU General Public License), GCC (GNU’s collection of compilers). They’ve got the Gulf Cooperation Council, of course, coreutils, LS, RM, et cetera, et cetera.

So GNU has a lot to do, but they don’t really have a working kernel. There was GNU Hurd, which was under development in the early 1990s but wasn’t fully operational when Linux came along.

Linux

Linus Torvalds released Linux back in 1991. That’s a kernel. So the Linux kernel is an operating system kernel, which means it is not a complete operating system. He distributed it as a GPL, so it was integrated with a lot of other GPL content.

Then there was the BSD Unix effort, released in 1992. This led to NetBSD, FreeBSD, and later OpenBSD, and I think DragonFly…… Some of the other

So Linux and BSD: they have more in common than differences. They are very similar, but the differences are what we focus on (of course) because those are the interesting parts. That’s what makes it unique. That’s why we should even have multiple in the first place. But what they have in common is the Unix philosophy and Unix architecture.

The Unix philosophy

The Unix philosophy includes the following ideas:

  • “Make each program do one thing well.”
  • “Write programs that work together”
  • “Write a program to handle text streams.”

So everything is words. If you can assume it’s text, then you can write simpler programs to do more things.

The Unix architecture

Next comes the Unix architecture, which has a unified file system that uses interprocess communication through pipes. We’ve talked a little bit about pipes as the primary means of communication. It also includes a shell script and command syntax called the Unix shell, which brings us full circle.

Thus, when we talk about Unix tools or “modern Unix,” we mainly mean the following programs:

  1. Follow the Unix philosophy
  2. Runs within the Unix architecture
  3. Execute from the Unix shell

This could be on BSD, this could be on a Linux distribution, this could be on macOS, all of which are Unix-like systems.

That’s all for this article

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