Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

What defines an operating system isn’t a geeky label or a collection of ramblings from the mouths of its community members. Nor is it some empty and pointless certification offered up by an obscure ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

Two weeks ago frequent contributors p_msac and bportlock challenged me to see Linux as not Unix and to discuss the consequences of that difference. The reality here is simple: Linus Torvalds started ...

Takeaway: Unix’s rock-solid reliability means that its relevant now more than ever – and Linux puts Unix’s power within reach. Unix has been around for a very long time. We remember the rampant ...

Present day commercial Unix versions are well behind the research community. As far back as 1982 the single machine focus of Unix development became an issue in the research community. Accordingly a ...

The basic idea is that it is Unix if it acts like Unix, regardless of the underlying code. A still broader definition of Unix would include Unix-like operating systems — sometimes called Unix “clones” ...

The Unix operating system has been around for decades, and it and its lookalikes (mainly Linux) are a critical part of the computing world. Apple’s operating system, macOS, is Unix-based, as are ...

Electronics as a hobby and knowledge of the boundaries between hardware and software have long been something too expensive and too obfuscated for most people to access. It hasn’t been until the last ...

There's more to safer systems languages than Rust If you're looking for a Unix-like, POSIX-compatible, real-time kernel, ...

When considering the issue of best practice as it applies to the administration of Unix servers, there are a number of questions you might want to ask yourself. They begin with “What is best practice?