Реферат: DOS And Unix Essay Research Paper Compare

consists of a number of utility programs. Although DOS had cornered the PC

market, UNIX was still dominant on the larger workstations. The birth of UNIX in

1969 provided the world with its first modern operating system. An interactive

multi-user operating system, UNIX was initially developed by programmers for

their own use. Working for Bell Laboratories, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

created UNIX as an operating system for the PDP-7 computer. Designed as a

simplification of an operating system named Multics, UNIX was developed in

Assembly language, a primitive computer language specific to one type of machine

(Osiris, 1). However, Thompson developed a new programming language ?B?

which Ritchie enhanced to ?C?, and in 1973 this was used to rewrite UNIX

which lended the OS portability (Linux Intl., 1). The original design philosophy

for UNIX was to distribute functionality into small parts, the programs (Theochem,

1). In this way, functionality could be achieved by combining the small parts

(programs) in new ways. Moreover, if a new program were to appear, it could be

integrated into the system. UNIX was slow to catch on outside of academic

institutions but soon was popular with businesses as well. The first five

versions were part of an internal research effort of Bell Labs, and it was not

until the sixth version, called UNIX Timesharing Sixth Edition V, that UNIX was

widely distributed (Osiris, 1). Relatively recent developments are graphical

interfaces (GUI) such as MOTIF, X Windows and Open View. UNIX has two major

versions. One, jointly developed by UNIX Systems Laboratories (USL) and by

AT&T researchers together with Bell Labs, generically known as System V, is

the commercial version and is the most widely distributed by major

manufacturers. The second, developed by the University of Berkley and Berkley

Software Distribution (BSD), is the educational version and is completely

focused on research. The USL version is now on its fourth release, or SVR4,

while BSD?s latest version is 4.4. However, there are many different versions

of UNIX besides these two. The operating system has been licensed to several

manufacturers who in turn developed their own versions of UNIX, based on System