Name: Dhanraj Sudhir Chavan

Div: A
Roll No: A-04
PRN: 1819000187

UNIX OPERATING SYSTEM

ISE 1 | Component 1












 UNIX – HISTORY

KEN THOMPSON DENNIS RITCHIE

A notorious ‘second-system effect‘often afflicts the successors of small experimental

prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too
frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less
common, is the ‘third-system effect’; sometimes, after the second system has collapsed of its
own weight, there is a chance to go back to simplicity and get it really right.

The original Unix was a third system. Its grandfather was the small and simple Compatible
Time-Sharing System (CTSS), either the first or second timesharing system ever deployed
(depending on some definitional questions we are going to determinedly ignore). Its father
was the pioneering Multics project, an attempt to create a feature-packed ‘information utility’
that would gracefully support interactive timesharing of mainframe computers by large
communities of users. Multics, alas, did collapse of its own weight. But Unix was born from
that collapse.

 In the end of 1960s, the young engineer at AT&T Bell Labs Kenneth (Ken) Thompson worked
on the project of Multics operating system. Multics (Multiplexing Information and Computer
Services) was an experimental operating system for GE-645 mainframe, developed in 1960s
by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs, and General Electric. It introduced many
innovations, but had many problems, and in the end of 1960s, Bell Labs, frustrated by the
slow progress and difficulties, pulled out of the project. Thus Thompson, with the help of his
colleagues Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna, decided to experiment with
some Multics concepts and to redo it on a much smaller scale. Thus in 1969 the idea of now
ubiquitous Unix was born.

While Ken Thompson still had access to the Multics

environment, he wrote simulations for the new
file and paging system on it.Later the group continued
his work on blackboards and scribbled notes. Also in
1969, Thompson developed a very attractive game,
Space Travel, first written on Multics, then
transliterated into Fortran for GECOS, and finally for
a little-used PDP-7 (shown in figure)at Bell Labs. The
same PDP-7 then he decided to use for the
implementation of the first UNIX. On this PDP-7 and
using its assembly language, the team of researchers
(initially without financial support from Bell Labs)
led by Thompson and Ritchie, developed a
hierarchical file system, the concepts of computer
processes and device files, a command-line
interpreter. PD7

The name Unics was coined in 1970 by the team member Brian Kernighan, who played on
Multics name. Unics (Uniplexed information and computing system) could eventually support
multiple simultaneous users, and was later shortened to Unix.

The Unix tr adition of lightweight development and informal methods also began at its
beginning. Where Multics had been a large project with thousands of pages of technical
specifications written before the hardware arrived, the first running Unix code was
brainstormed by three people and implemented by Ken Thompson in two days — on an
obsolete machine that had been designed to be a graphics terminal for a ‘real’ computer.
In 1970 Thompson and Ritchie wanted to use Unix on a much larger machine than the PDP-7,
and traded the promise of adding text processing capabilities to Unix to some financial
support from Bell, porting the code for a PDP-11/20 machine. Thus for the first time in 1970,
the Unix operating system was officially named and ran on the PDP-11/20. It added a text
formatting program called roff and a text editor. All three were written in PDP-11/20
assembly language. Bell Labs used this initial "text processing system", made up of Unix, roff,
and the editor, for text processing of patent applications. Roff soon evolved into troff, the first

electronic publishing program with a full typesetting capability.

Ken Thompson (seated) and Dennis Ritchie(standing) with the DEC PDP-11 to which they migrated
the Unix effort in 1971.

Unix's first real job, in 1971, was to support what would now be called word processing for
the Bell Labs patent department; the first Unix application was the ancestor of the nroff(1)
text formatter. This project justified the purchase of a PDP-11, a much more capable
minicomputer. Management remained blissfully unaware that the word-processing system
that Thompson and colleagues were building was incubating an operating system. Operating
systems were not in the Bell Labs plan — AT&T had joined the Multics consortium
precisely to avoid doing an operating system on its own. Nevertheless, the completed system
was a rousing success. It established Unix as a permanent and valued part of the computing

 ecology at Bell Labs, and began another theme in Unix's history — a close association with
document-formatting, typesetting, and communications tools. The 1972 manual claimed 10
installations.

In 1972, Unix was rewritten in the C programming language, contrary to the general notion at
the time "that something as complex as an operating system, which must deal with time-
critical events, had to be written exclusively in assembly language" (although Unix was not
the first OS, written in high-level language, it was Burroughs B5000 from 1961). C language
was created by Ritchie as an improved version of B language, created by Thompson as a
translation of BCPL from Martin Richards. The migration from assembly language to the
higher-level language C resulted in much more portable software, requiring only a relatively
small amount of machine-dependent code to be replaced when porting Unix to other
computing platforms.

AT&T made Unix available to universities and commercial firms, as well as the United States
government, under licenses. The licenses included all source code including the machine-
dependent parts of the kernel, which were written in PDP-11 assembly code. Copies of the
annotated Unix kernel sources circulated widely in the late 1970s in the form of a much-copied
book, which led to considerable use of Unix as an educational example. At some point, ARPA
(Advanced Research Projects Agency) adopted Unix as a standard language for the Arpanet
(the predecessor of Internet) community.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-
scale adoption of Unix (particularly of the BSD version, originating from the University of
California, Berkeley) by many commercial startups, for example Solaris, HP-UX and AIX.
Today, in addition to certified Unix systems such as those already mentioned, Unix-like
operating systems such as Linux and BSD descendants (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD).

In 1984 Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation (FSF) began the GNU project, a
project to create a free version of the Unix operating system. By free, Stallman meant

 software that could be freely used, read, modified, and redistributed. The FSF successfully
built a vast number of useful components, including a C compiler (gcc), an impressive text
editor (emacs), and a host of fundamental tools. However, in the 1990’s the FSF was having
trouble developing the operating system kernel [FSF 1998]; without a kernel their dream of a
completely free operating system would not be realized.

In 1991 Linus Torvalds began developing an operating system kernel, which he named “Linux”
[Torvalds 1999]. This kernel could be combined with the FSF material and other components
(in particular some of the BSD components and MIT’s X-windows software) to produce a
freely-modifiable and very useful operating system. In the Linux community, different
organizations have combined the available components differently. Each combination is called
a “distribution”, and the organizations that develop distributions are called “distributors”.
Common distributions include Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera, Corel, and Debian. There
are differences between the various distributions, but all distributions are based on the same
foundation: the Linux kernel and the GNU glibc libraries. Since both are covered by “copyleft”
style licenses, changes to these foundations generally must be made available to all, a unifying
force between the Linux distributions at their foundation that does not exist between the BSD
and AT&T-derived Unix systems.

 Modern Variants of UNIX

1. System V:

● System V is the name of several versions of Unix, as distributed by AT&T. It is relevant to

Linux not only because Linux is largely a

re-implementation of Unix, but because for a time, Linux most closely resembled System V as
compared with the Research and BSD lineage of Unix. It is mostly irrelevant now as System V is
very obsolete and Linux has evolved far beyond those roots.

● Compared to the other major Unix flavor, BSD, System V was

more conservative and focused on open standards. It was favored by commercial enterprises,
which contrasted with BSD's strength in the academic arena. However, in 1987, AT&T worked
with Sun Microsystems to produce System V, revision 4 (SVR4), which

incorporated elements of BSD and SunOS into System V. Most commercial Unix
implementations are based on the SVR4 model, and it has also influenced Linux.

2. BSD:

● BSD UNIX stands for Berkeley Software Distribution UNIX, a version of UNIX that
originated many common UNIX features such as the vi editor, C shell, and TCP/IP
networking.

● BSD UNIX formed the basis of the SunOS from Sun Microsystems. Sun later combined
features of both BSD and System V into their popular Solaris operating system. Another
variant of BSD is the FreeBSD operating system

 FLAVOURS OF UNIX

Unix is not a single operating system. It is in fact a general name given to dozens of o.s. by
different companies, organizations or groups of individuals. These variants of unix are referred to
as flavors. Although based on the same core set of unix commands, different flavors can have
their own unique commands and features, and are designed to work with different types of h/w.
Linux is often considered a unix flavor.

1. AIX:

AIX is commercial version of unix product IBM.AIX® operating system delivers these
capabilities and more, with the performance, reliability and security your mission-critical data
requires.AIX UNIX operating system maintains a strong, long-standing security focus and
reputation. Security features include Trusted AIX to easily harden the security settings of the
system and Trusted Execution to control the integrity of the system.

2. BSD:

Berkeley Software Distribution.BSD is configured for internet hosting, web hosting, and hosting
many servers on one system. It is the first OS to have added an internet protocol. BSD OSes have
a very strongly enforced timesharing system, which makes them most useful where resources are
shared between processes.

3. Caldera:

The Caldera Open UNIX 8 deployment platform uses Linux Kernel Personality (LKP).Caldera
Linux, also known as Caldera OpenLinux, was a Linux variant released by Caldera Systems
(now known as the SCO Group) in 1997. Caldera OpenLinux was designed to cater primarily to
the needs of businesses, focusing on enterprise productivity software. There were a few releases
of Caldera, all of which were distinct in some way.

"OpenLinux Lite" was free and available for anyone to download.

"OpenLinux Base" and "OpenLinux Standard" were commercial versions offering extended
features and technical support. These features included replacements for Microsoft Exchange
Server and Microsoft Outlook.

 4. FreeBSD:

FreeBSD makes a great internet server Or firewall, and recent advancements make freeBSD
powerful multimedia editing workstation.FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance,
security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even
some of the best commercial ones.FreeBSD brings advanced network operating system features
to appliance and embedded platforms, from higherend Intel-based appliances to ARM, PowerPC,
and MIPS hardware platforms.

5. HP-UX:

HP-UX was the first Unix to use access control lists for file access permissions. It is a pure
server operating system with high availability and flexible memory and security management.
HP-UX is equipped with a variety of tools for use in enterprises for the monitoring (costs, work
load) as well as for the logging and visualization. This operating system has a built-in host
intrusion detection (H-IDS).

6. Solaris:

Solaris is the Unix flavor produced by sun Microsystems. Support LDAP authentication and
NDS. Supports automatic and dynamic reconfiguration of hardware devices. Cover various
Internet and intranet applications like DNA, Senmail, IPv6, IPsec. High Internet Security.

7. Linux:

Linux has generated more excitement in the computer field than any other development.Linux
was designed to be similar to UNIX, but has evolved to run on a wide variety of hardware from
phones to supercomputers. Every Linux-based OS involves the Linux kernel— which manages
hardware resources—and a set of software packages that make up the rest of the operating
system. Linux flavors: Red-hat, Fedora, SEUSE, Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, mandrake.