Daily Archives: 25 March 2009

Unix Turns 40. Happy Birthday!

25 Wednesday Mar 2009

Posted by in Computers

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ComputerWorld reports that Unix turns 40.  Why would anyone but the geeks care about this birthday? Because just about everything that works well on your personal computer has Unix roots – except for the graphical interface which came from Xerox PARC.

  • The hierarchical file system in which a directory contains files and other directories which in turn contain files and directories, etc, etc.
  • Linux, an open source Unix, runs most of the web servers of the world.
  • Sockets, a programming layer on top of  the TCP communications protocol, first appeared on BSD Unix. All of the web and email services we rely on is built with sockets.
  • Open source started at UC Berkley with BSD.
  • Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web on a Unix based NeXT system using BSD Unix and  sockets.

Happy 40th Unix!

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