The UNIX Derivative

Long before when not only an OS, but a computer was like a dream to common man and computers were just mighty piece of machines, and people who used these machines were known as geeks. The story of OS starts from there, many OS were just piece of interpreted command line interfaces, most of which were build only in Assembly Level Programming. But as it is said, progress never stops man so man never stops progress, a wave came from time and technology in year 1960 when need was felt to develop a new OS base techniques. In year 1968, a consortium of researchers from General Electric, AT&Bell Labs and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forward a new OS project MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Services). Main job of this project was to develop an OS that will be able to handle files, multitasking and multiple user(This project was real base that was put forward for creating a true multi-user OS). Since technology does not advances only in one direction, technology related to graphics processing also came forward and before arrival of 1970, market marked arrival of console based gaming and very first console based game got released in year 1972. So before that could h#-Link-Snipped-#appen Dennis Ritchie thought now creating an OS with Assembly Level Programming will be penalty for programmers and things must switch to OS built with a programming language, so that it can even withstand gaming consoles with a sturdy platform. He tested several programming languages for the reason but all failed to test put forward by him, so he himself decided to create a new programming language which became heart and sole of most programmers all over the world and that programming language is known as 'C'. The original UNIX platform came to existence in year 1969 whereas it got modified by Ken Thompson and Denise Ritchie by re-writing it in C in year 1973. Thus UNIX became first OS to fulfill all demands put forward by MULTICS and act as platform for other programs including games and console based services.

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In year 1987, US born Computer Science Lecturer, Sir Andrew Tanenbaum wrote a clone to UNIX OS known as MINIX (MINI-uNIX) to help students understand working of an OS. Source code was free and soon there was music among students to create a more efficient MINIX variant. Soon a Finnish student named Linux Trovalds started adding features to MINIX as his needs were concerned and put it forward as his project work. On 5th of October 1991 he announced his own POSIX kernel called Linux which originally used MINIX file system but not based on MINIX kernel, the only difference among others and him was that he licensed it under GNU General Public License which claims, everyone in the world is free to use, modify or redistribute or sell a piece of code until you gave changes back to the creator. So if you are the one who thinks Linux is entire desktop then think twice because Linux is just a kernel which is part of system, which looks after hardware, runs programs but generally stays away from the OS. In other words Linux is system that runs your Desktop system without letting you bother it is present or not. Later, various other modifications were done to kernel on which many Linux Distributions were based, for example, easy to use kernel forms base of Ubuntu, power user base for fedora, speed of operation for Gentoo and there are so many to list for.

When I recall about graphics processing I can remember the first PC based game “Space Travel” was designed for UNIX which further marked end of BGI graphics and advent 3D graphics forward in early 1990's in form of OpenGL. C which was developed for making UNIX more reliable became base for todays most advanced programming languages like CPP, Java, Perl, CGI, Python, Ruby, Auto-Script etc. Hardwares once designed for using on mainframe computers has to pass UNIX tests to got put forward in markets. So as per my view is concerned nearly each big thing in computing history has to do something with origin or development of UNIX system, and if you think Windows is left apart then beware Windows GRLDR is nothing but a GRUB variant developed for Windows and when we hear GRUB we know anyhow it is just related to booting UNIX and LINUX systems. So many times when I turn back pages to history about any major computing technology, I found it anyhow goes somewhere near UNIX. In other words nearly all major computing technologies were built directly or indirectly or in some manner with respect to UNIX, so I think we can say nearly each major computing technology we are using today is nothing but somehow just a UNIX DERIVATIVE.

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This post is contributed by CEan Leo Aka Nrupen.