Quirky, seemingly counter-intuitive, beloved by Playful Hackers, but incredibly flexible, UNIX has gone from a little-known research operating system in The '70s to an entire design philosophy. In its experimental days, UNIX stood in the background, influencing OSes but not making much noise on its own; that changed starting in the early 1980s, when the first commercial UNIX products appeared, and exploded in the mid-1990s, as OSes either based directly on UNIX or following its principles came to the forefront via the World Wide Web. Even though you might think Microsoft Windows dominates the computer market, since 2014, UNIX-based operating systems outrank Microsoft's in terms of usage share, spanning pretty much all the scales and sizes of computing — from uCLinux for micro-controllers and embedded devices, to Apple iOS and Android for smartphones, to Linux and macOS for desktop computers, Oracle Solaris, HP-UX and IBM AIX for servers and mainframes. Even when it's not in use, however, it can be said that UNIX is, in TV Tropes parlance, the Trope Codifier and sometimes even Trope Maker for many of the features we take for granted in modern computer systems.
UNIX was once considered unfriendly, requiring expensive licensing and large minicomputers to run; now, almost all of UNIX's source code is freely licensed:
- BSD variants are licensed under "BSD licenses" (these generally omit clause 3, the "advertising clause", which requires attribution in advertising — Berkeley have rescinded theirs, and such clauses prove GPL-incompatible and generally impractical). The fourth clause (third in the three-clause variant), which forbids the use of the author's name for promotional purposes, is also frequently dropped, mainly due to the fact that copyright law generally does not give users permission to use the author's name in that way to begin with. FreeBSD and NetBSD use the two-clause form for new code (OpenBSD uses the similar ISC license instead) and either form without the advertising clause is GPL-compatible.
- Sun's (now Oracle's) Solaris, a UNIX System V OS (since version 2), had much of its code freed with OpenSolaris; while this was discontinued by Oracle in favor of the original proprietary Solaris OS, the irrevocable nature of free and open-source licenses such as OpenSolaris's Common Development and Distribution License (derived from the Mozilla Public License) allowed its kernel to be forked into illumos, while the OS itself was given a Spiritual Successor in the form of OpenIndiana, by the late Ian Murdock of Debian fame, who grew up and went to school in Indiana.
- Last but not least, the Linux kernel has been free and open-source software for quite some time, having been released under the GNU General Public License (GPL)
since early on in its life, ever since Linus Torvalds switched from a license prohibiting non-commercial use, and GNU (the UNIX-style environment typically used with Linux) is free and open source as its principal aim.
Multics was a research OS; it was highly ambitious, highly secure, required expensive GE and Honeywell mainframes to run, and was also stuck in Development Hell. One of the research partners was Bell Labs, then the experimental division of the Bell System, and in 1969, they decided to leave the project. This left one programmer there, Ken Thompson, with not much else to do.
Thompson had a pet project going on Bell's Multics machine, a game called Space Travel, but at several dollars (in 1969 money) per run, using it was not economically sound. Looking for a cheaper alternative (as well as a new project to work on), he spotted a spare DEC PDP-7 in his lab, and began porting Space Travel to it. As he did, he found himself recreating various parts of Multics around it; eventually, he had a file system, kernel and utilities ready to go. Since it was kind of like Multics, but "neutered", he decided to call the new system "Unics". Eventually, after getting a more powerful system (a DEC PDP-11) to improve Unics and work on the first real application for it (a typesetting package that eventually became nroff), Ken and his development partner Dennis Ritchie started setting the name in small caps, at which point it mutated into "UNIX," which would have been displayed as "UÉ´ÉŞx" with Ritchie's formatting.
Not long after the first edition of UNIX was published inside Bell Labs, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie started work on making the system portable. In the early 1970s, this was a big deal, since almost all OSes up to that point had been written specifically for the machine they were going to run on. The idea was to write most of the kernel in a higher-level language that could be "compiled" into code for different machines, then add small bits of machine-dependent code where needed to handle things like interrupts and memory.note The language Dennis invented for the project was called C, and became extremely influential after he and Brian Kernighan published a book on it.
Once UNIX was ported to C, Bell Labs started allowing researchers at universities to study its insides. Since the Bell System was still a regulated monopoly at the time, and thus couldn't sell computers or OSes, Bell Labs would give university computer science departments access to the UNIX source code for the cost of duplication once they signed a non-disclosure agreement. UNIX became very popular in operating systems classes after this. The lecture notes of one Australian computer science professor, John Lions of the University of New South Wales, were compiled into a book (Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code, aka the Lions Book) and became a widely bootlegged underground publication and circulated for years this way due to both the Bell System's licensing strictures and the later UNIX Wars (see below);note it was, finally, legally published in book form 20 years later, in 1996.
The college with the most influence by far, though, was the University of California at Berkeley. Berkeley's Computer Science Research Group added many new features to UNIX, eventually creating their own version of UNIX called the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD. Among the many things they did were porting UNIX from the PDP-11 to the VAX, adding networking support, improving the user input/output functions significantly, and generally cleaning things up. The icing on the cake was the licensing — Berkeley put their changes under a license that allowed free distribution and modification. This meant that anyone with a Bell UNIX license could use BSD.
In the meantime, Bell Labs released what would be the last important version of "classic" UNIX, the 7th Edition (otherwise known as "Version 7" or "V7" to fans). V7 was considered by many the last true version of UNIX ever, and through ports like Xenix found its way onto many machines not powerful enough to run BSD UNIX. There was also a full rewrite called "MINIX", aimed at teaching UNIX concepts (and, later, advanced concepts such as microkernels) to students and curious enthusiasts who couldn't get a V7 license from Bell, and as a legal substitute for the Lions Book. This was many people's first introduction to UNIX concepts, and like BSD, it would have a huge influence later on. (MINIX 3, whose first version was released in 2005, dropped the license fees in favor of being licensed similarly to BSD. This was eventually followed by the OS borrowing code from NetBSD.)
In the early 80s, it looked like things would keep going as they had, with UNIX being primarily an academic research OS, for the foreseeable future. But as usually happens in history, a major change was triggered by something that at first seemed completely unrelated. In the case of UNIX, the seemingly unrelated trigger was American antitrust law.
In 1982, AT&T (the Bell System's parent company) lost a long-running lawsuit with the US Department of Justice, and was forced to divest itself of its local telephone service companies. In return, they were finally allowed to enter the computer industry, and commercializing UNIX was at the top of their priorities. They changed the licensing such that various parts of the system were "unbundled" or a la carte, making a usable UNIX system much more expensive. In the meantime, the UNIX group at Bell continued working on the original UNIX tree, which eventually became UNIX System V, the basis of all of AT&T and its partners' commercial UNIX offerings. Most vendors ended up merging it with their own code bases and creating their own UNIX variants such as HP-UX (Hewlett-Packard) and AIX (IBM). Direct ports of System V were available from outside porting houses like Interactive Systems. Many observers thought that with UNIX, AT&T was poised to seriously challenge IBM's dominance of computing.
At around the same time, a researcher at MIT's AI Lab named Richard Stallman decided he was fed up with companies founded by ex-AI-lab-members which often built upon AI lab software and were expected to be used by the AI lab, "hoarding" their innovations and preventing sharing of code.note His main concerns were that, once the source to various parts of an OS were "non-free" or made unavailable, fixing or improving on them was impossible (or, at least, extremely difficult), and that this could lead to monopoly behavior and rip communities apart. note This was hastened by the death of the AI lab's own operating system, ITS. He envisioned a complete operating system where all of the parts were "free software" (in analogy with "free speech")note and could be modified and/or shared with others at will, but with the caveat that the programming code for the changes had to be shared as well. note He called his vision "GNU", a Recursive Acronym for "GNU's Not UNIX!", posted a manifesto describing his intentions to Usenet in 1983, and created the Free Software Foundation to oversee the effort. By 1990, the FSF would have most of the parts of GNU ready, including a compiler, utilities, libraries and such, but no kernel to run the system under.
On the other side of the US, in Silicon Valley, some of the Berkeley researchers, along with hardware designers from Stanford, got together to make the first computers designed specifically to run UNIX, called workstations, which shrunk the power of minicomputers down to the desktop form factor. The most famous of these was Sun Microsystems, named after the Stanford University Network, a part of the ARPANET, the ancestor of the Internet. Other companies, like Silicon Graphics, soon followed, and even companies that historically had ignored UNIX before (HP and IBM) got into the fold with the HP 9000 (running HP/UX) and the IBM RT-PC (running either AIX or AOS, a BSD derivative). Bolstered by the existing popularity of UNIX in academia, particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields, these workstations made it the computing platform of choice for scientists and engineers around the world. UNIX workstations, especially those from Silicon Graphics, also helped make CGI ubiquitous in TV and film through the '80s and '90s.
Starting around 1988, Sun and AT&T entered into an agreement to develop UNIX-based software together, and called the joint venture "UNIX International". As part of the agreement, Sun (who had been using a custom BSD variant called SunOS up to this point) and AT&T agreed to make a "merged" UNIX that would combine the best parts of BSD and System V; this was released as System V Release 4 in 1990, with Sun's version being released under the name Solaris 2note . Other vendors, specifically DEC, IBM, and HP, felt snubbed and formed the Open Software Foundation in protest, and began work on a UNIX derivative called OSF/1, which (like NeXTStep and, much later, Mac OS X), was based on the Mach microkernel and parts from 4.3 BSD.
In the meantime, the IBM Personal Computer and its clones were taking the commercial market by storm, and the Mac was introducing people to a new way of working that many felt no one could touch. UNIX was in a state of disarray; most vendors had proprietary changes to their UNIX builds, none of which were compatible with the others, and porting software was becoming more difficult. This inspired some of the first standards for UNIX, promulgated by the POSIX working groups and by X/Open. Getting everyone to agree would be difficult, but as the PC became more and more powerful and Microsoft began talking about making a version of Windows to compete with UNIX, the impetus to cooperate grew. By the mid-1990s, UNIX International had been disbanded, and OSF stopped development on OSF/1 (leaving DEC to maintain their own branch, renamed "Tru64", for their Alpha machines); OSF merged with X/Open to form the aforementioned Open Group.
At Berkeley, a programmer by the name of Keith Bostic, inspired by Stallman's GNU Project (and Berkeley's own separation of their TCP/IP code in "Networking Release 1"), came up with a large project of his own: purge the BSD codebase of proprietary AT&T code to allow Berkeley-based startups to market it without licenses from AT&T. Involving almost all of the UCB Computer Science Research Group, the project was almost completely successful, with the results being released as "Networking Release 2" or "Net/2", and two "forks" soon emerged; "BSD/OS" from startup BSDi, and "386/BSD", a free software product from Bill Jolitz, nicknamed "Jolix."
Eventually, AT&T decided to wash their hands of the whole thing, and spun off the UNIX group as UNIX System Laboratories (USL). In one final salvo before concluding the war, USL sued Berkeley and BSDi, claiming copyright infringement and restraint of trade. The possibility of a free UNIX appearing in the near future appeared dim.
In 1990, the GNU Project would launch the GNU Hurd kernel, hoping to create a kernel that would be free of any copyrighted code, as that was at the time the only part of the puzzle missing from the GNU Project. However, development was slow as the contributors were mostly hobbyists who worked on their own free time. Additionally, the choice of making the kernel a microkernel (as opposed to the monolithic kernel design Linux went with) meant it was exponentially harder to build and debug, as microkernels presented several additional obstacles not faced by monolithic kernel developers.
In 1991, a programmer in Helsinki, Finland, named Linus Torvalds, who was inspired by MINIXnote posted his intent to build a "little" UNIX clone (which he intended to be "just a hobby" and "nothing big like GNU") to Usenet, with some of the work already done. Others agreed to help, and by 1992 Linux, as it was dubbed by one of Linus's helpers,note was maturing quickly.
As the complete system itself incorporated GNU software, with Linus's kernel being the main original contribution, Linus made the important decision to put the Linux kernel under the same license as GNU's tools and utilities, making it attractive to developers who appreciated GNU's stance. With commercial UNIX still expensive, and BSD's future unclear, Linux grew quickly, and by 1995 had reached version 1.0; already, there were several vendors offering "distributions" ("distros" for short), or fully usable OSes incorporating the Linux kernel and GNU software at that time.note Some of them, like Linspire, SLS and AV Linux, came and went; others such as Slackware, Red Hat (later splitting into the free Fedora and the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux), SuSE, and Debian lived on, and new distros appear on the scene periodically; more on this later.
While all this was going on, Jolitz suddenly dropped support for 386BSD, resulting in a set of unofficial patches to the last version appearing. Eventually, these patches were cleaned up, improved, and became the subject of two forks: NetBSD, which focused on porting the Net/2 tapes to as many platforms as possible, and FreeBSD, which sought to continue where 386BSD left off, and make a quality BSD release intended specifically for PC compatibles. The USL lawsuit still loomed large, though, and progress was slow compared to Linux (which wasn't party to the lawsuit and could move at full speed).
Finally, USL was bought by Novell, and Novell decided to call a truce. It was decided that, with the exception of small parts of code inside the kernel, BSD was solely under Berkeley's license, and the UNIX trademark would be given over to X/Open. The decision meant that NetBSD and FreeBSD could return to full development, and by the late 1990s, development speed was on par with Linux. NetBSD itself would later be forked into OpenBSD, which has an emphasis on security, and FreeBSD 4.0 was forked into DragonFlyBSD, due to a disagreement over an architectural change in FreeBSD 5.0.
Linux and the BSDs were so successful that they relegated proprietary UNIX systems to specialized uses through the '90s and the '00s.
For a partial list of Linux distributions (as there's countless distributions), see Linux Distribution
Not long after this, another development in the software world had a huge impact on UNIX and the Internet. The World Wide Web was finally gaining in popularity after years of development, and the vehicle most people used to access web content was a program called "Netscape Navigator". The company behind it, also called Netscape, had placed the software under a license that allowed free usage for individuals and non-commercial organizations, but required payment for use in corporations; it was hoped that corporations would also invest in their server software, which was top-of-the-line for the time and quite expensive. The problems started when it turned out few people were registering their copies of Netscape; despite what the license said, registration was never mandatory and the program was effectively free to anyone interested. To add to this, Netscape's server software was being severely threatened by the Apache HTTP Server, which was not only free but gaining steadily in market share (and to this day is still the most popular Web server on the Internet by a wide margin, even beating Microsoft's own Internet Information Services). Finally, Microsoft introduced Windows 98 with an "Active Desktop" feature that integrated Web-browser functionality with the Windows desktop.
Strangely, Netscape was actually more upset over what Microsoft did (and the loss of affiliate revenue it would have cost them) than the fact that their server business was dying, and decided to sue Microsoft in a landmark antitrust suit. But that wasn't the only strange thing Netscape did in 1998.
Inspired by the success of Linux and the BSDs, and no doubt knowing that the company itself was in bad shape, Netscape decided to release the sources to the latest version of Communicator (amounting to Navigator plus an email client and an HTML editor) under a free license. Out of the meetings for this came a term called "open source", which attempted to provide the gist of the free software movement's goals without having to go into licensing details, making it easier for people not up on their legalese to understand what was going on.
This was a controversial move. GNU partisans have said that it draws attention away from the ideological purpose, "missing the point" as it were, whereas others have argued that the English word "free" is too often used to mean "free-of-charge" to be understood correctly, and that said misunderstanding would give the impression that the software is worthless from a business perspective.note
Either way, the term stuck, and "open source" now indicates any software license that conforms to the Open Source Definition, a set of rules based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines (Debian being a highly influential and somewhat conservative distribution of Linux).
As for Netscape, most of the company migrated to Mozilla Foundation (originally known as the Mozilla Organization),note a non-profit founded to handle the development of a new browser based on the Communicator code. After a few false starts (including a decision to rewrite most of the client from scratch, a move that rankled some of the Netscape veterans), the new browser was in usable shape by 2003. A slimmed-down version corresponding to Navigator only (without the built-in mail/news reader or the Web page editor) was developed alongside it, and eventually became Mozilla Firefox.note A slimmed-down version consisting of only the email/news reader eventually became Mozilla Thunderbird. note The full-blown internet suite was originally planned to be left for dead, but said group of Netscape veterans saved it by bringing it under their wing, rechristened it Seamonkey, and brought it back in shape.
UNIX today
Now, in The New Twenties, UNIX and its clones and derivatives have become more popular than ever. ChromeOS and various other PC-centric distributions of Linux are giving Microsoft a run for its money for the first time in years, especially on low-end PCs that can't run the latest versions of Microsoft Windows well. The adoption of Linux on older PCs was also helped by supply chain issues in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic making new PCs harder to come by. A resurgent Mac (running UNIX itself) is also competing with Microsoft on the high end. Still, desktop use of Linux is more popular with developers, engineers and anti-Microsoft technophiles rather than the general public, though pre-installed Linux computers are more common outside of the U.S. The BSDs are popular in server, networking and security-related applications; NetBSD in particular also supports a bevy of older machines (including vintage minicomputers like the DEC VAX) that would otherwise be forgotten.
Amusingly, Windows itself eventually added official support for Linux distributions and applications through the Windows Subsystem for Linux; the first version is Middleware like the existing open-source MSYS and Cygwin packages, but WSL 2 uses a real Linux kernel virtualized through Hyper-V, which increases performance and compatibility, especially with networking tools. WSLg allows both X11 and Wayland graphical apps to run in Windows.
Apple decided to open-source the kernel and user tools for Darwin (the basis of macOS (formerly OS X) and iOS), and even Solaris (one of the last bastions of old-school commercial UNIX) has since been opened up—just to close again after Sun was bought up by Oracle, which caused much of the community to fork the last open release into the illumos project, and OpenIndiana, formerly a community respin of OpenSolaris, was subsequently refactored to use the illumos kernel.
There are also several forks of the official Linux kernel, and other UNIX-style systems, being used on high-end electronic devices and smartphones, as well as in networking gear like Ethernet switches and routers, and in many embedded devices. For example: Apple's iOS, used on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, contains code from the Darwin base of MacOS (formerly OS X), which contains code forked from FreeBSD and NeXTSTEP, the latter of which is based on 4.3BSD. Google's Android operating system, iOS's main competitor, contains a fork of the Linux kernel at its core. Also, Sony has confirmed that the PlayStation 4's OS is in fact a customized version of FreeBSD while its predecessor, PlayStation 3, used a customized FreeBSD kernel alongside various proprietary libraries. This continues into the release of the PlayStation 5, which also used the FreeBSD kernel. Several home routers also run Linux: either by default, or modded by way of DD-WRT, OpenWRT or Tomato. Linux even powers a number of Midway Games' slot and gambling machines, and some arcade game manufacturers (ie Bandai Namco Entertainment with their Wangan Midnight series starting from WMMT4) prefer Linux to Windows Embedded due to the practically nonexistent licensing costs.
The development of "netbooks"—small, simple, low-cost, low-power laptop computers geared towards Internet functionality at the expense of gaming and multimedia—also worked in UNIX's favor. Many discarded the traditional x86 architecture, due to power consumption and cost concerns, in favor of the ARM (Advanced RISC Machinenote ) architecture used by the vast majority of embedded devices such as cell phones. The only current version of Microsoft Windows for ARM processors is a variant of Windows 10 for tablets and netbooks, which replaced both the largely incompatible "Windows RT" (a modified version of Windows 8) and Windows 10 Mobile, and the vast majority of ARM netbooks run UNIX-style OSs, usually Linux OSs. For example, Chromebooks run Chrome OS, a specialized Gentoo Linux variant.
Gaming on Linux has long been a sore spot, with many bigger studios declining to port their games over to the platform. This began to improve in 2013 when Valve Software created a derivative of Debian called SteamOS More info, which powers its line of Steam Machine consoles but also is free to download for anyone interested in using their own custom hardware. However, the OS and its complementary Steam Machine hardware failed to take off, with fewer than a million units sold and most vendors discontinuing the product by 2016. It has been speculated that this was due to poor initial builds and delays in updates and hardware, with Microsoft rolling out the free Windows 10 upgrade promotion at the same time to steal its thunder. Though development was put in hiatus on July 2019, in July 2021 the Steam Deck was announced: a handheld designed for PC games, running an overhauled version of SteamOS, now based on Arch Linux. In 2018 Valve released Proton, a compatibility layer that essentially makes it possible to run Windows software on Linux.More info A site, ProtonDB, keeps track of how well each game performs on Linux, and as of December 2021 about 75% of all Steam games can be played with little issue, of which around 20% have native Linux ports. With over a million Decks sold, this led to Linux finally beginning to gain a much stronger foothold in the gaming market.
Furthermore, a lot of game engines and anti-cheat systems that were previously either hard to port over to Linux, or just outright incompatible - such as Unity, Unreal Engine, Source / Source 2, EasyAntiCheat and BattlEye - are being properly supported now. This is largely due to the common practice of indie developers making Linux ports for crowdfunding backers and a (very) slow, but noteworthy, increase in Linux market share renewing interest in the platform by larger companies. The move is seen as encouraging, and many fans of Linux believe this to be finally signalling the rise of Linux as a serious competitor to Windows in the gaming arena. Several game console and computer emulators also have native Linux support, so that's a bonus.
Whatever happens, Unix's flexibility and portability mean that it will continue to be a platform of choice for technical computer users for a long time.
