Definitions: UNIX

Definition

In 1965, a group of  AT&T employees at Bell Labs began working on a new multi-tasking operating  system that they later called UNIX. It was first available to the public in 1975  after having been rewritten in the C programming language. The name UNIX is a designation given by the open group to an operating system that meets a set of  standards based on X/Open Company's XPG4, IEEE's POSIX Standards and ISO C. Today, they are grouped together into a single standard maintained by the Open Group.

Business applications

UNIX is most often used as an operating system for servers that require high input and output of data, usually multi-user systems such as  databases and web servers. Version 10 of the MacOS (OSX) desktop platform, however, has met and been approved as a version of UNIX by the Open Group. The major factor in using UNIX systems  is the reliability that comes with the open standards and design methodologies  of it. It is slow changing, which provides a more stable system.

Concerns

UNIX is a designation, not a brand. As such, there are many  flavors of UNIX, such as Hewlett Packard’s HPUX, Sun Microsystems’ Solaris,  IBM's AIX. Though, one of the most widely used operating systems, Linux, does  not carry the UNIX certification--even though it meets the technical  requirements. Even so, there are those in the industry that try to connect UNIX  with open source community. While there is a sort of link, more common than  not, the software deployed with UNIX systems is in supported vendor provided applications. This sometimes causes confusion with among those who are not educated in the ways of UNIX.

There have also been recent rumors of Linux putting UNIX out of  play, but that seems unlikely for now.

Technical details

UNIX is a certification given to OSs based on the Open Groups standards of UNIX95, UNIX98 and UNIX03. These certifications are based on long running standards that determine the interoperability of source code and internal operations of the operating system. There is a very stick process for attaining the UNIX designation. his test suite usually involves internationalization and the ability to compile certain machine source code into executable form.