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The paramount operating system which came into existance due to a simple computer game

Today UNIX , the paramount operating system of the Internet runs on all sizes of computers, from humble PC laptops, to powerful desktop-visualisation workstations, and even to supercomputers that require special cooling fluids to prevent them from burning up while working.

An operating system (OS) is a control program which assists the user to run other programs UNIX is a powerful OS that is used by most servers on the Internet, and thus can be called the operating system of the Internet. In order to master the Internet and interact with the many computers linked to it, a knowledge of UNIX is can be essential.

In UNIX you have a choice of many commands unlike Microsoft MS DOS and the Apple Macintosh interfaces which are considered easy to use, Both have been designed to give the user less power. Both have dramatically fewer commands than UNIX. UNIX is considerably more powerful and flexible than anything provided by either Microsoft or Apple.

To understand why the UNIX operating system has so many commands and why it's not only the premier multi-user, multitasking operating system, but also the most successful and the most powerful multichoice system for computers you'll have to travel back in time. And learn where UNIX was designed, what were the goals of the original programmers, and what's happened to UNIX in the subsequent decades.

Unlike DOS, MS-Windows, OS/2, the Macintosh, VMS, MVS, and just about any other operating system, UNIX was designed by a few programmers as a fun project, and it evolved through the efforts of hundreds of programmers, each of whom was exploring his or her own ideas or particular aspects of operating system design and user interaction.

It all started back in the late 1960s in a dark and stormy laboratory deep in the recesses of the American Telephone and Telegraph Online(AT&T) corporate facility in New Jersey. Working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs were co developing a massive, monolithic operating system called Multics. On the Bell Labs team were Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and other people in the Computer Science Research Group who would prove to be key contributors to the new UNIX operating system.

When 1969 rolled around, Bell Labs was becoming increasingly disillusioned with Multics, an overly slow and expensive system that ran on General Electric mainframe computers which themselves were expensive to run and rapidly becoming obsolete. The problem was that Thompson and the group really liked the capabilities Multics offered, particularly the individual-user environment and multiple-user aspects. In that same year, Thompson wrote a computer game called Space Travel, first on Multics, then on the GECOS (GE computer operating system).

In his quest to improve the game, Thompson found a little-used Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7, and with some help from Ritchie, he rewrote the game for the PDP-7. Development was done on the GE mainframe and hand-carried on paper tape to the PDP-7. One he had explored some of the capabilities of the PDP-7 , Thomson could not resist building on the game and implemented a version of a file system, then adding processes, simple file utilities (cp, mv) and a command interpreter that he called a shell.

The following year the newly created system acquired its name UNIX, which Brian Kernigan suggested as a pun on Multics. The first customer for UNIX was the Patent Department inside the labs, a group that needed a system for preparing patent applications. There UNIX was a dramatic success, and it did not take long for others inside Bell labs to begin clamouring for their own UNIX computer system.

In the 1970s, AT & T distributed UNIX to colleges and universities for a nominal charge as they were not allowed to sell it by the US government who wanted to restrict the monopoly position of the company. Before long UNIX became the research and development operating system of choice.

Although UNIX developed from a computer game in Bell labs. The UNIX of today is not only , the product of a couple of inspired programmers at Bell Labs. Many other organisations and institutions contributed significant additions to the system as it evolved from its early beginnings and grew into the monster it is today. Most important were the C shell, TCP/IP networking, vi editor, Berkeley Fast File System, and sendmail electronic-mail-routing software from the Computer Science Research Group of the University of California at Berkeley. Also most important were the early versions of UUCP and Usenet from the University of Maryland, Delaware and from Duke University.

After dropping Multics development completely, MIT didn't come into the UNIX picture until the early 1980s, when it developed the X Window System as part of its successful Athena project. Ten years and four releases later, X is the predominant windowing system standard on all UNIX systems, and it is the basis of Motif, OpenWindows, and Open Desktop. Gradually, big corporations have become directly involved with the evolutionary process, notably Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Digital Equipment Corporation.

Little companies have started to get into the action too, with UNIX available from Apple for the Macintosh; from IBM for both PCs, RISC-based workstations, and new PowerPC computers; and even from Commodore for its worthy Amiga system.

The book Teach yourself UNIX in a week starts where you are likely to start: at the point when you turn on your system and something new shows up. You might be in a state of panic, shock, or total excitement. This book provides hands-on, task-oriented projects, useful tips, and technical information to get you started using your UNIX system. This book takes you from elementary operating system tasks, such as logging on and creating files, to advanced techniques, such as programming in C on a UNIX system and surfing the Internet. Everything in this hook, by orientation and example, has the goal of assisting you in accomplishing everyday tasks.

Whether you need help with a specific UNIX task or you want a step-by-step tutorial on every aspect of the operating system, you will find what you need in this book For beginners, there's coverage of basic concepts of working in an operating system and the basic techniques of using UNIX. For readers who are more technically advanced, there's reference information about various aspects of using UNIX. For people who need just to dip into" the book and learn about a specific topic, the clear, task-oriented organisation makes doing so fast and easy.

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