UNIX

UNIX is a portable, multi-user, operating system developed at Bell Laboratories by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (the inventor of the C programming language) which emphasizes simplicity of implementation. The name is a pun on the MIT-developed Multics operating system which had a much more complex implementation.

Web servers running on UNIX-based systems accounted for 83% of the total servers according to information gathered on a normal WebCrawler indexing run in the fall of 1995.

URLs:

Butterfly Glossary

This site has lots of good definitions.

comp.unix.programmer

This is just one of the many unix related Usenet newsgroups.

comp.unix.questions.

And here's a good place on Usenet to bring your Unix questions.

W3E References:

DOS (Disk Operating System)

OS (Operating System)

Unix Shell

Print References:

• IBM Dictionary of Computing by George McDaniel. New York, McGraw Hill, 1994. (ISBN: 0-07-031489-6)
• Que's Computer and Internet Dictionary by Brian Pfaffenberger with David Wall. Que, Indianapolis, IN, 1995. (ISBN: 0-7897-0356-4)

Detail:

If you ever see the word UN*X, it's still our pal UNIX. It was written that way in order to avoid legal problems, as UNIX was a word trademarked by AT&T. Lawyers now say that the trademark indicators after every use of the name have no legal force, but the use of UN*X still occurs. There are those who think that it is written that way out of reverence, just as in certain religions the name of the deity is never spelled out in full.