111-474: Xenix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system for various microcomputer platforms, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) later acquired exclusive rights to the software, and eventually replaced it with SCO UNIX (now known as Xinuos OpenServer ). In the mid-to-late 1980s, Xenix was the most common Unix variant, measured according to
222-456: A graphical user interface (GUI) to be sold commercially. It uses a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 5 MHz and has 1 MB of RAM. It can be upgraded to 2 MB and later shipped with as little as 512 kilobytes. The CPU speed and model were not changed from the release of the Lisa 1 to the repackaging of the hardware as Macintosh XL. The real-time clock uses a 4-bit integer and the base year
333-429: A time-sharing configuration, as well as portability. Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text for storing data; a hierarchical file system ; treating devices and certain types of inter-process communication (IPC) as files; and the use of a large number of software tools , small programs that can be strung together through a command-line interpreter using pipes , as opposed to using
444-484: A time-sharing operating system for the GE 645 mainframe computer. Multics featured several innovations , but also presented severe problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics, but not by its goals, individual researchers at Bell Labs started withdrawing from the project. The last to leave were Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie , Douglas McIlroy , and Joe Ossanna , who decided to reimplement their experiences in
555-623: A 12-inch (30 cm) screen. Lisa's printer support includes Apple's Dot Matrix , Daisy Wheel , and ImageWriter dot matrix printers, and Canon 's new color inkjet technology. The original Lisa, later called the Lisa 1, has two FileWare 5.25-inch double-sided variable-speed floppy disk drives, more commonly known by Apple's codename "Twiggy". They have what was then a very high capacity of approximately 871 kB each, but are unreliable and use proprietary diskettes. Competing systems with high diskette data storage have much larger 8" floppy disks, seen as cumbersome and old-fashioned for
666-680: A 1984 Intel manual for Xenix 286 noted that the Xenix kernel had about 10,000 lines at this time. It was followed by a System V R2 codebase in Xenix 5.0 (a.k.a. Xenix System V). "Microsoft hopes that Xenix will become the preferred choice for software production and exchange", the company stated in 1981. Microsoft referred to its own MS-DOS as its "single-user, single-tasking operating system", and advised customers who wanted multiuser or multitasking support to buy Xenix. It planned over time to improve MS-DOS so it would be almost indistinguishable from single-user Xenix, or XEDOS , which would also run on
777-519: A 1999 interview, Dennis Ritchie voiced his opinion that Linux and BSD Unix operating systems are a continuation of the basis of the Unix design and are derivatives of Unix: I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as
888-568: A computer capable of supporting a system such as Xenix from scratch," and "the Xenix kernel must be custom-tailored to each new hardware environment." A generally available port to the unmapped Intel 8086/8088 architecture was done by The Santa Cruz Operation around 1983. SCO Xenix for the PC XT shipped sometime in 1984 and contained some enhancement from 4.2BSD ; it also supported the Micnet local area networking. The later 286 version of Xenix used
999-469: A consumer system. Lisa 1's innovations include block sparing, to reserve blocks in case of bad blocks, even on floppy disks. Critical operating system information has redundant storage, for recovery in case of corruption. The first hardware revision, the Lisa 2, was released in January 1984 and was priced between $ 3,495 and $ 5,495 . It was much less expensive than the original model, and dropped
1110-460: A convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmers. The system grew larger as the operating system started spreading in academic circles, and as users added their own tools to the system and shared them with colleagues. At first, Unix was not designed to support multi-tasking or to be portable . Later, Unix gradually gained multi-tasking and multi-user capabilities in
1221-429: A generic term such as system to help avoid the creation of a genericized trademark . Apple Lisa Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple , produced from January 19, 1983 to August 1, 1986, and succeeded by Macintosh . It is generally considered the first mass-market personal computer operable through a graphical user interface (GUI). In 1983, a machine like the Lisa was still so expensive that it
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#17327731499101332-409: A larger, higher-resolution display. Lisa's CPU and the storage system were strained by the complexity of the operating system and applications, especially its office suite , and by the ad hoc protected memory implementation, due to the lack of a Motorola memory management unit . Cost-cutting measures that target the consumer market, and the delayed availability of the 68000 processor and its impact on
1443-486: A marketing consultancy firm to find names to replace "Lisa" and "Macintosh" (at the time considered by Jef Raskin to be merely internal project codenames) and then rejected all of the suggestions. Privately, Hertzfeld and the other software developers used "Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym", a recursive backronym , and computer industry pundits coined the term "Let's Invent Some Acronym" to fit Lisa's name. Decades later, Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson : "Obviously it
1554-405: A new project of smaller scale. This new operating system was initially without organizational backing, and also without a name. The new operating system was a single-tasking system. In 1970, the group coined the name Unics for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service as a pun on Multics , which stood for Multiplexed Information and Computer Services . Brian Kernighan takes credit for
1665-512: A potential universal operating system, suitable for computers of all sizes. The Unix environment and the client–server program model were essential elements in the development of the Internet and the reshaping of computing as centered in networks rather than in individual computers. Both Unix and the C programming language were developed by AT&T and distributed to government and academic institutions, which led to both being ported to
1776-420: A reference directory layout for Unix-like operating systems; it has mainly been used in Linux. The Unix system is composed of several components that were originally packaged together. By including the development environment, libraries, documents and the portable, modifiable source code for all of these components, in addition to the kernel of an operating system, Unix was a self-contained software system. This
1887-504: A representation like Un*x , *NIX , or *N?X is used to indicate all operating systems similar to Unix. This comes from the use of the asterisk ( * ) and the question mark characters as wildcard indicators in many utilities. This notation is also used to describe other Unix-like systems that have not met the requirements for UNIX branding from the Open Group. The Open Group requests that UNIX always be used as an adjective followed by
1998-399: A set of cultural norms for developing software, norms which became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself; this has been termed the Unix philosophy . The TCP/IP networking protocols were quickly implemented on the Unix versions widely used on relatively inexpensive computers, which contributed to the Internet explosion of worldwide, real-time connectivity and formed
2109-487: A single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These concepts are collectively known as the " Unix philosophy ". Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike summarize this in The Unix Programming Environment as "the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves". By the early 1980s, users began seeing Unix as
2220-544: A single nine-track magnetic tape , earning its reputation as a portable system. The printed documentation, typeset from the online sources, was contained in two volumes. The names and filesystem locations of the Unix components have changed substantially across the history of the system. Nonetheless, the V7 implementation has the canonical early structure: The Unix system had a significant impact on other operating systems. It achieved its reputation by its interactivity, by providing
2331-458: A text-based appliance computer. Jobs redefined Macintosh as a cheaper and more usable form of Lisa's concepts, and led the skunkworks project with substantial motivation to compete in parallel with the Lisa team. In September 1981, below the announcement of the IBM PC , InfoWorld reported on Lisa, "McIntosh", and another Apple computer secretly under development "to be ready for release within
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#17327731499102442-479: A uniform interface, but at the expense of occasionally requiring additional mechanisms such as ioctl and mode flags to access features of the hardware that did not fit the simple "stream of bytes" model. The Plan 9 operating system pushed this model even further and eliminated the need for additional mechanisms. Unix also popularized the hierarchical file system with arbitrarily nested subdirectories, originally introduced by Multics. Other common operating systems of
2553-508: A versatile document preparation system, and an efficient file system featuring sophisticated access control, mountable and de-mountable volumes, and a unified treatment of peripherals as special files ." The latter permitted the Network Control Program (NCP) to be integrated within the Unix file system, treating network connections as special files that could be accessed through standard Unix I/O calls , which included
2664-402: A wider variety of machine families than any other operating system. The Unix operating system consists of many libraries and utilities along with the master control program, the kernel . The kernel provides services to start and stop programs, handles the file system and other common "low-level" tasks that most programs share, and schedules access to avoid conflicts when programs try to access
2775-458: A year". It described Lisa as having a 68000 processor and 128KB RAM, and "designed to compete with the new Xerox Star at a considerably lower price". In May 1982, the magazine reported that "Apple's yet-to-be-announced Lisa 68000 network work station is also widely rumored to have a mouse ." Apple Confidential said, "Finally, and perhaps most damaging, even before the Lisa began shipping in June,
2886-549: Is available under an Apple Academic License Agreement. In April 1984, following the Macintosh launch, Apple introduced MacWorks, a software emulation environment enabling Lisa to run Macintosh System software and applications. MacWorks improved Lisa's market appeal. After the early Macintosh operating system first gained hard disk support, MacWorks also gained access to Lisa's hard disk in September. In January 1985, MacWorks
2997-485: Is defined as 1980; the software won't accept any value below 1981, so the only valid range is 1981–1995. The real-time clock depends on a 4 × AA-cell NiCd pack of batteries that only lasts for a few hours when main power is not present. Prone to failure over time, the battery packs could leak corrosive alkaline electrolyte and ruin the circuit boards. The integrated monochrome black-on-white monitor has 720 × 364 rectangular pixels on
3108-431: Is said to have used Xenix on Sun workstations and VAX minicomputers extensively within their company as late as 1988. All internal Microsoft email transport was done on Xenix-based 68000 systems until 1995–1996, when the company moved to its own Exchange Server product. SCO released its SCO Unix as a higher-end product, based on System V R3 and offering a number of technical advances over Xenix; Xenix remained in
3219-462: The Apple II division upon taking Raskin's project. Newer Lisa models addressed its shortcomings but, even with a major price reduction, the platform failed to achieve sales volumes comparable to the much less expensive Mac. The Lisa 2/10 is the final model, then rebranded as the high-end Macintosh XL . Though the original documentation only refers to it as "The Lisa", Apple officially stated that
3330-535: The Apple III SOS operating system released three years earlier, Lisa's disk operating system also organizes its files in hierarchical directories. File system directories correspond to GUI folders, as with previous Xerox PARC computers from which Lisa borrowed heavily. Lisa was designed around a hard drive, unlike the first Macintosh. Lisa has two main user modes: the Lisa Office System and
3441-479: The Apple III of 1980. Apple sold a total of approximately 10,000 Lisa machines at US$ 9,995 (equivalent to about $ 30,600 in 2023) each, generating total sales of $ 100 million against a development cost of more than $ 150 million . The largest Lisa customer was NASA , which used LisaProject for project management. The Lisa 2 and its Mac ROM -enabled Macintosh XL version are the final two releases in
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3552-782: The GNU Compiler Collection (and the rest of the GNU toolchain ), the GNU C library and the GNU Core Utilities – have gone on to play central roles in other free Unix systems as well. Linux distributions , consisting of the Linux kernel and large collections of compatible software have become popular both with individual users and in business. Popular distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux , Fedora , SUSE Linux Enterprise , openSUSE , Debian , Ubuntu , Linux Mint , Slackware Linux , Arch Linux and Gentoo . A free derivative of BSD Unix, 386BSD ,
3663-589: The Macintosh Plus was introduced in 1986. The Lisa operating system features protected memory , enabled by a crude hardware circuit compared to the Sun-1 workstation (c. 1982), which features a full memory management unit. Motorola did not have an MMU (memory-management unit) for the 68000 ready in time, so third parties developed their own. Apple's is also the result of a cost-cutting compromise, with sluggish performance. Based, in part, on elements from
3774-586: The UNIX 98 or UNIX 03 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a substantial certification fee and annual trademark royalties to The Open Group. Systems that have been licensed to use the UNIX trademark include AIX , EulerOS , HP-UX , Inspur K-UX , IRIX , macOS , Solaris , Tru64 UNIX (formerly "Digital UNIX", or OSF/1 ), and z/OS . Notably, EulerOS and Inspur K-UX are Linux distributions certified as UNIX 03 compliant. Sometimes
3885-637: The breakup of the Bell System in 1982, AT&T started selling System V. Microsoft, believing that it could not compete with Unix's developer, decided to abandon Xenix. The decision was not immediately transparent, which led to the term vaporware . It agreed with IBM to develop OS/2 , and the Xenix team (together with the best MS-DOS developers) was assigned to that project. In 1987, Microsoft transferred ownership of Xenix to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning slightly less than 20% of SCO (this amount prevented both companies from having to disclose
3996-558: The desktop metaphor . Steve Jobs visited PARC in 1979 and was absorbed and excited by the revolutionary mouse-driven GUI of the Alto . By late 1979, Jobs successfully negotiated a sale of Apple stock to Xerox, in exchange for his Lisa team receiving two demonstrations of ongoing research projects at PARC. When the Apple team saw the demonstration of the Alto computer, they were able to see in action
4107-421: The userland Microsoft added a "visual shell" for menu-driven operation instead of the traditional UNIX shell . A limited form of local networking over serial lines ( RS-232 ports) was possible through the "micnet" software, which supported file transfer and electronic mail , although UUCP was still used for networking via modems . OEMs often added further modifications to the Xenix system. Trusted Xenix
4218-517: The 68000, Z8000, and LSI-11; they would be upwardly compatible with Xenix, which Byte in 1983 described as "the multi-user MS-DOS of the future". Microsoft's Chris Larson described MS-DOS 2.0's Xenix compatibility as "the second most important feature". His company advertised DOS and Xenix together, describing MS-DOS 2.0 (its "single-user OS") as sharing features and system calls with Xenix ("the multi-user, multi-tasking, Unix-derived operating system"), and promising easy porting between them. After
4329-476: The Lisa and wrote in February 1983 that it was "the most important development in computers in the last five years, easily outpacing [the IBM PC ]". It acknowledged that the $ 9,995 price was high, and concluded "Apple ... is not unaware that most people would be incredibly interested in a similar but less expensive machine. We'll see what happens". The Lisa was a commercial failure, the company's largest since
4440-430: The Lisa had been hard work. He said the system's hard disk and RAM was a requirement and not a luxury, but that the system remains slow. He noted that, by 1989, Lisa's level of integration between applications had not yet been repeated by Apple. Original "Twiggy" based Lisa 1 systems command high prices at auction due to the scarcity of surviving examples. The auction record for a Lisa 1 was set on September 10, 2024, when
4551-617: The Lisa line, which was discontinued in April 1985. The Macintosh XL is a hardware and software conversion kit to effectively reboot Lisa into Macintosh mode. In 1986, Apple offered all Lisa and XL owners the opportunity to return their computer and pay $ 1,498 , in exchange for a Macintosh Plus and Hard Disk 20 . Reportedly, 2,700 working but unsold Lisa computers were buried in a landfill. The Macintosh project, led by Steve Jobs, borrowed heavily from Lisa's GUI paradigm and directly took many of its staff, to create Apple's flagship platform of
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4662-465: The Lisa only had the original seven applications that Apple had deemed enough to "do everything". UniPress Software released UNIX System III for $ 495 (equivalent to $ 1,500 in 2023). Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) published Microsoft Xenix (version 3), a Unix-like command-line operating system for the Lisa 2, and Microsoft's Multiplan 2.1 spreadsheet for Xenix. Other Lisa Xenix apps include Quadratron's Q-Office suite. BYTE previewed
4773-495: The Lisa, as compared to the earlier Apple II — AST offered a 1.5 MB memory board which, when combined with the standard Apple 512 KB memory board, expanded the Lisa to a total of 2 MB of memory, the maximum amount that the MMU can address. Late in the product life of the Lisa, there were third-party hard disk drives, SCSI controllers , and double-sided 3.5-inch floppy-disk upgrades. Unlike
4884-430: The Macintosh project from Jef Raskin , who had conceived it as a sub- $ 1,000 (equivalent to $ 4,200 in 2023) text-based appliance computer in 1979. Jobs immediately redefined Macintosh to be graphical, but as a less expensive and more focused alternative to Lisa. Macintosh's launch in January 1984 quickly surpassed Lisa's underwhelming sales. Jobs began assimilating increasing numbers of Lisa staff, as he had done with
4995-487: The Open Group Base Specification. In 1999, in an effort towards compatibility, several Unix system vendors agreed on SVR4's Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) as the standard for binary and object code files. The common format allows substantial binary compatibility among different Unix systems operating on the same CPU architecture. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard was created to provide
5106-474: The Twiggy floppy drives in favor of a single 400K Sony microfloppy . The Lisa 2 has as little as 512 KB of RAM. The Lisa 2/5 consists of a Lisa 2 bundled with an external 5- or 10-megabyte hard drive. In 1984, at the same time the Macintosh was officially announced, Apple offered free upgrades to the Lisa 2/5 to all Lisa 1 owners, by replacing the pair of Twiggy drives with a single 3.5-inch drive, and updating
5217-491: The UNIX trademark to The Open Group , an industry consortium founded in 1996. The Open Group allows the use of the mark for certified operating systems that comply with the Single UNIX Specification (SUS). Unix-like operating systems have been relevant since the 1990s which function similarly to Unix: popular examples are GNU (including Linux ), FreeBSD and macOS . Unix was originally meant to be
5328-494: The United Kingdom, as part of making further improvements to Xenix and porting Xenix to other platforms. In doing so, Microsoft gave HCR and Logica the rights to do Xenix ports and to license Xenix binary distributions in those territories. In 1984, a port to the 68000-based Apple Lisa 2 was jointly developed by SCO and Microsoft and it was the first shrink-wrapped binary product sold by SCO. The Multiplan spreadsheet
5439-707: The Workshop. The Lisa Office System is the GUI environment for end users. The Workshop is a program development environment and is almost entirely text-based, though it uses a GUI text editor. The Lisa Office System was eventually renamed 7/7 which refers to the seven supplied application programs: LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaProject , LisaList, and LisaTerminal. Apple's warranty said that this software works precisely as stated, and Apple refunded an unspecified number of users, in full, for their systems. These operating system frailties, and costly recalls, combined with
5550-632: The added benefit of closing all connections on program exit, should the user neglect to do so. In order "to minimize the amount of code added to the basic Unix kernel ", much of the NCP code ran in a swappable user process, running only when needed. In October 1993, Novell , the company that owned the rights to the Unix System V source at the time, transferred the trademarks of Unix to the X/Open Company (now The Open Group ), and in 1995 sold
5661-440: The basic elements of what constituted a workable GUI. The Lisa team put a great deal of work into making the graphical interface a mainstream commercial product. The Lisa was a major project at Apple, which reportedly spent more than $ 50 million on its development. More than 90 people participated in the design, plus more in the sales and marketing effort, to launch the machine. BYTE magazine credited Wayne Rosing with being
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#17327731499105772-465: The basis for a widely implemented operating system interface standard (POSIX, see above). The C programming language soon spread beyond Unix, and is now ubiquitous in systems and applications programming. Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix (and programs that ran on it) established
5883-435: The basis for implementations on many other platforms. The Unix policy of extensive on-line documentation and (for many years) ready access to all system source code raised programmer expectations, and contributed to the launch of the free software movement in 1983. In 1983, Richard Stallman announced the GNU (short for "GNU's Not Unix") project, an ambitious effort to create a free software Unix-like system—"free" in
5994-461: The boot ROM and I/O ROM. In addition, the Lisa 2's new front faceplate accommodates the reconfigured floppy disk drive, and it includes the new inlaid Apple logo and the first Snow White design language elements. The Lisa 2/10 has a 10 MB internal hard drive, no parallel port, and a standard configuration of 1 MB of RAM. Developing early Macintosh software required a Lisa 2. There were relatively few third-party hardware offerings for
6105-492: The command interpreter an ordinary user-level program, with additional commands provided as separate programs, was another Multics innovation popularized by Unix. The Unix shell used the same language for interactive commands as for scripting ( shell scripts – there was no separate job control language like IBM's JCL ). Since the shell and OS commands were "just another program", the user could choose (or even write) their own shell. New commands could be added without changing
6216-479: The core of the Mac OS X operating system, later renamed macOS . Unix-like operating systems are widely used in modern servers , workstations , and mobile devices . In the late 1980s, an open operating system standardization effort now known as POSIX provided a common baseline for all operating systems; IEEE based POSIX around the common structure of the major competing variants of the Unix system, publishing
6327-432: The design process, made the user experience sluggish. The workstation -tier high price and lack of a technical software application library made it a difficult sale for all markets. The IBM PC's popularity and Apple's decision to compete with itself through the lower-priced Macintosh also hindered Lisa's acceptance. In 1982, after Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project by Apple's board of directors, he appropriated
6438-432: The early to mid-1970s. Development of project "LISA" began in 1978. It underwent many changes and shipped at US$ 9,995 (equivalent to $ 30,600 in 2023) with a five-megabyte hard drive . It was affected by its high price, insufficient software, unreliable FileWare ( codename Twiggy) floppy disks , and the imminent release of the cheaper and faster Macintosh . Only 60,000 Lisa units were sold in two years. Lisa
6549-546: The era had ways to divide a storage device into multiple directories or sections, but they had a fixed number of levels, often only one level. Several major proprietary operating systems eventually added recursive subdirectory capabilities also patterned after Multics. DEC's RSX-11M 's "group, user" hierarchy evolved into OpenVMS directories, CP/M 's volumes evolved into MS-DOS 2.0+ subdirectories, and HP's MPE group.account hierarchy and IBM's SSP and OS/400 library systems were folded into broader POSIX file systems. Making
6660-486: The exact amount in the event of an SCO IPO). And SCO would acquire both of the other companies that had Xenix rights, Logica 's software products group in 1986 and HCR in 1990. When Microsoft eventually lost interest in OS/2 as well, the company based its further high-end strategy on Windows NT . In 1987, SCO ported Xenix to the 386 processor, a 32-bit chip, after securing knowledge from Microsoft insiders that Microsoft
6771-465: The firm that eventually became IDEO. Bruce Daniels was in charge of applications development, and Larry Tesler was in charge of system software. The user interface was designed in six months, after which the hardware, operating system, and applications were all created in parallel. In 1982, Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, and he appropriated Jef Raskin 's existing Macintosh project. Raskin had conceived and led Macintosh since 1979 as
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#17327731499106882-679: The first POSIX standard in 1988. In the early 1990s, a separate but very similar effort was started by an industry consortium, the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative, which eventually became the Single UNIX Specification (SUS) administered by The Open Group . Starting in 1998, the Open Group and IEEE started the Austin Group , to provide a common definition of POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification, which, by 2008, had become
6993-461: The future when personal computers became powerful enough, purchased a license for Version 7 Unix from AT&T in 1978, and announced on August 25, 1980, that it would make the software available for the 16-bit microcomputer market. Because Microsoft was not able to license the "Unix" name itself, the company gave it an original name. Microsoft called Xenix "a universal operating environment". It did not sell Xenix directly to end users, but licensed
7104-472: The help of Sun Remarketing, Apple disposed of approximately 2,700 unsold Lisa units in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah , to receive a tax write-off on the unsold inventory. Some leftover Lisa computers and spare parts were available until Cherokee Data (which purchased Sun Remarketing) went out of business. The Lisa was first introduced on January 19, 1983. It is one of the first personal computer systems with
7215-516: The iSBC 309. The first Intel Xenix systems shipped in July 1982. Tandy more than doubled the Xenix installed base when it made TRS-Xenix the default operating system for its TRS-80 Model 16 68000-based computer in early 1983, and was the largest Unix vendor in 1984. Seattle Computer Products also made (PC-incompatible) 8086 computers bundled with Xenix, like their Gazelle II, which used the S-100 bus and
7326-420: The idea, but adds that "no one can remember" the origin of the final spelling Unix . Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Peter G. Neumann also credit Kernighan. The operating system was originally written in assembly language , but in 1973, Version 4 Unix was rewritten in C . Version 4 Unix, however, still had much PDP-11 specific code, and was not suitable for porting. The first port to another platform
7437-467: The integrated MMU present on this chip, by running in 286 protected mode . The 286 Xenix was accompanied by new hardware from Xenix OEMs. For example, the Sperry PC/IT, an IBM PC AT clone, was advertised as capable of supporting eight simultaneous dumb terminal users under this version. While Xenix 2.0 was still based on Version 7 Unix, version 3.0 was upgraded to a Unix System III code base,
7548-476: The late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix ( BSD and System V ) by commercial startups, which in turn led to Unix fragmenting into multiple, similar — but often slightly and mutually incompatible — systems including DYNIX , HP-UX , SunOS / Solaris , AIX , and Xenix . In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4 ( SVR4 ), which
7659-428: The modular design of the Unix model, sharing components is relatively common: most or all Unix and Unix-like systems include at least some BSD code, while some include GNU utilities in their distributions. Linux and BSD Unix are increasingly filling market needs traditionally served by proprietary Unix operating systems, expanding into new markets such as the consumer desktop , mobile devices and embedded devices . In
7770-443: The more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers. In the same interview, he states that he views both Unix and Linux as "the continuation of ideas that were started by Ken and me and many others, many years ago". OpenSolaris was the free software counterpart to Solaris developed by Sun Microsystems , which included a CDDL -licensed kernel and a primarily GNU userland. However, Oracle discontinued
7881-543: The most important person in the development of the computer's hardware until the machine went into production, at which point he became the technical lead for the entire Lisa project. The hardware development team was headed by Robert Paratore. The industrial design, product design, and mechanical packaging were headed by Bill Dresselhaus, the Principal Product Designer of Lisa, with his team of internal product designers and contract product designers from
7992-536: The much less expensive Mac. The Macintosh project assimilated a lot more Lisa staff. The final revision, the Lisa 2/10, was modified and sold as the Macintosh XL . The high cost and the delays in its release date contributed to the Lisa's discontinuation although it was repackaged and sold at $ 4,995 , as the Lisa 2. In 1986, the entire Lisa platform was discontinued. In 1987, Sun Remarketing purchased about 5,000 Macintosh XLs and upgraded them. In 1989, with
8103-441: The name was an acronym for "Local Integrated Software Architecture". Because Steve Jobs's first daughter was named Lisa (born in 1978), it was sometimes inferred that the name also had a personal association, and perhaps that the acronym was a backronym contrived later to fit the name. Andy Hertzfeld said that the acronym was reverse-engineered from the name "Lisa" in late 1982 by the Apple marketing team after they had hired
8214-477: The next several decades. The column-based interface , for instance, utilized by Mac OS X, had originally been developed for Lisa. It had been discarded in favor of the icon view. Apple's culture of object-oriented programming on Lisa contributed to the 1988 conception of Pink , the first attempt to re-architect the operating system of Macintosh. In 1989, after Wayne Rosing had moved to Sun Microsystems , he reflected on his time at Apple, recalling that building
8325-587: The number of machines on which it was installed. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said at Unix Expo in 1996 that, for a long time, Microsoft had the highest-volume AT&T Unix license. Bell Labs , the developer of Unix, was part of the regulated Bell System and could not sell Unix directly to most end users (academic and research institutions excepted); it could, however, license it to software vendors who would then resell it to end users (or their own resellers), combined with their own added features. Microsoft, which expected that Unix would be its operating system of
8436-475: The operating system should provide a set of simple tools, each of which performs a limited, well-defined function. A unified and inode -based filesystem and an inter-process communication mechanism known as " pipes " serve as the main means of communication, and a shell scripting and command language (the Unix shell ) is used to combine the tools to perform complex workflows. In the early 1990s, AT&T sold its rights in Unix to Novell , which then sold
8547-640: The operating system to the Zilog Z8000 series, Digital LSI-11 , Intel 8086 and 80286 , Motorola 68000 , and possibly "numerous other processors", and provide Microsoft's "full line of system software products", including BASIC and other languages. The first port was for the Z8001 16-bit processor: the first customer ship was January 1981 for Central Data Corporation of Illinois, followed in March 1981 by Paradyne Corporation's Z8001 product. The first 8086 port
8658-677: The original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie , and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System , AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley ( BSD ), Microsoft ( Xenix ), Sun Microsystems ( SunOS / Solaris ), HP / HPE ( HP-UX ), and IBM ( AIX ). Early versions of Unix ran on PDP-11 computers; Unix
8769-429: The original Macintosh, the Lisa has expansion slots. The Lisa 2 motherboard has a very basic backplane with virtually no electronic components, but plenty of edge connector sockets and slots. There are two RAM slots, one CPU upgrade slot, and one I/O slot, all in parallel. At the other end are three Lisa slots in parallel. In January 1985, following the Macintosh, the Lisa 2/10 (with integrated 10 MB hard drive)
8880-503: The original version of Unix – the entire system was configured using textual shell command scripts. The common denominator in the I/O system was the byte – unlike "record-based" file systems . The focus on text for representing nearly everything made Unix pipes especially useful and encouraged the development of simple, general tools that could easily be combined to perform more complicated ad hoc tasks. The focus on text and bytes made
8991-448: The press was full of intentionally-leaked rumors about a fall release of a 'baby Lisa' that would work in much the same way, only faster and cheaper. Its name: Macintosh." Lisa was launched on January 19, 1983. Its low sales were quickly surpassed by the January 1984 launch of the Macintosh. Newer versions of the Lisa were introduced that addressed its faults and lowered its price considerably, but it failed to achieve sales comparable to
9102-493: The product line. In the meantime, AT&T and Sun Microsystems completed the merge of Xenix, BSD, SunOS and System V R3 into System V R4. The last version of SCO Xenix/386 itself was System V R2.3.4, released in 1991. Aside from its AT&T Unix base, Xenix incorporated elements from BSD , notably the vi text editor and its supporting libraries ( termcap and curses ). Its kernel featured some original extensions by Microsoft, notably file locking and semaphores , while to
9213-401: The project evolved into the " window-and-mouse-driven " form of its eventual release. Trip Hawkins and Jef Raskin contributed to this change in design. Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs was involved in the concept. At Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), research had already been underway for several years to create a new humanized way to organize the computer screen, which became known as
9324-599: The project upon their acquisition of Sun, which prompted a group of former Sun employees and members of the OpenSolaris community to fork OpenSolaris into the illumos kernel. As of 2014, illumos remains the only active, open-source System V derivative. In May 1975, RFC 681 described the development of Network Unix by the Center for Advanced Computation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign . The Unix system
9435-591: The related business operations to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). Whether Novell also sold the copyrights to the actual software was the subject of a federal lawsuit in 2006, SCO v. Novell , which Novell won. The case was appealed, but on August 30, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the trial decisions, closing the case. Unix vendor SCO Group Inc. accused Novell of slander of title . The present owner of
9546-505: The same privilege level as the key loaded in the STU-III). It was evaluated by formal methods and achieved a B2 security rating under the DoD 's Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (examples of A1-class systems are Honeywell's SCOMP , Aesec's GEMSOS , and Boeing's SNS Server ). Version 2.0 was released in January 1991, version 3.0 in April 1992, and version 4.0 in September 1993. It
9657-482: The same resource or device simultaneously. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the distinction of kernel space from user space , the latter being a lower priority realm where most application programs operate. The origins of Unix date back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Bell Labs , and General Electric were developing Multics ,
9768-535: The sense that everyone who received a copy would be free to use, study, modify, and redistribute it. The GNU project's own kernel development project, GNU Hurd , had not yet produced a working kernel, but in 1991 Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel as free software under the GNU General Public License . In addition to their use in the GNU operating system, many GNU packages – such as
9879-427: The shell itself. Unix's innovative command-line syntax for creating modular chains of producer-consumer processes ( pipelines ) made a powerful programming paradigm ( coroutines ) widely available. Many later command-line interpreters have been inspired by the Unix shell. A fundamental simplifying assumption of Unix was its focus on newline - delimited text for nearly all file formats. There were no "binary" editors in
9990-654: The software at a nominal fee for educational use, by running on inexpensive hardware, and by being easy to adapt and move to different machines. Unix was originally written in assembly language , but was soon rewritten in C , a high-level programming language . Although this followed the lead of CTSS , Multics and Burroughs MCP , it was Unix that popularized the idea. Unix had a drastically simplified file model compared to many contemporary operating systems: treating all kinds of files as simple byte arrays. The file system hierarchy contained machine services and devices (such as printers , terminals , or disk drives ), providing
10101-494: The software to OEMs such as IBM, Intel, Management Systems Development, Tandy , Altos Computer , SCO, and Siemens ( SINIX ) which then ported it to their own proprietary computer architectures . In 1981, Microsoft said the first version of Xenix was "very close to the original Unix version 7 source" on the PDP-11 , and later versions were to incorporate its own fixes and improvements. The company stated that it intended to port
10212-418: The system far more scalable and portable than other systems. Over time, text-based applications have also proven popular in application areas, such as printing languages ( PostScript , ODF ), and at the application layer of the Internet protocols , e.g., FTP , SMTP , HTTP , SOAP , and SIP . Unix popularized a syntax for regular expressions that found widespread use. The Unix programming interface became
10323-459: The trademark UNIX is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX" (others are called " Unix-like "). By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear
10434-715: The very high price point, led to the failure of the Lisa in the marketplace. NASA purchased Lisa machines, mainly to use the LisaProject program. In 2018, the Computer History Museum announced it would be releasing the source code for Lisa OS, following a check by Apple to ensure this would not impact other intellectual property. For copyright reasons, this release does not include the American Heritage dictionary. For its 40th anniversary on January 19, 2023, Lisa OS Software version 3.1's source code
10545-536: Was a port of Version 6, made four years later (1977) at the University of Wollongong for the Interdata 7/32 , followed by a Bell Labs port of Version 7 to the Interdata 8/32 during 1977 and 1978. Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are collectively referred to as Research Unix . In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to Donald B. Gillies at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) Department of Computer Science. During
10656-584: Was a variant initially developed by IBM , under the name Secure XENIX; later versions, under the Trusted Xenix name, were developed by Trusted Information Systems . It incorporated the Bell–LaPadula model of multilevel security, and had a multilevel secure interface for the STU-III secure communications device (that is, an STU-III connection would be made available only to those applications running at
10767-519: Was available in late 1983 or early 1984. There was also a port for IBM System 9000 . SCO had initially worked on its own PDP-11 port of V7, called Dynix, but then struck an agreement with Microsoft for joint development and technology exchange on Xenix in 1982. Microsoft and SCO then further engaged Human Computing Resources Corporation (HCR) in Canada, and a software products group within Logica plc in
10878-431: Was commonly used on minicomputers and mainframes from the 1970s onwards. It distinguished itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language , which allows Unix to operate on numerous platforms. Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the " Unix philosophy ". According to this philosophy,
10989-456: Was considered a commercial failure but with technical acclaim, introducing several advanced features that reappeared on the Macintosh and eventually IBM PC compatibles . These include an operating system with memory protection and a document-oriented workflow. The hardware is more advanced overall than the following Macintosh, including hard disk drive support, up to 2 megabytes (MB) of random-access memory (RAM), expansion slots, and
11100-483: Was for the Altos Computer Systems ' non-PC-compatible 8600-series computers (first customer ship date Q1 1982). Intel sold complete computers with Xenix under their Intel System 86 brand (with specific models such as 86/330 or 86/380X); they also offered the individual boards that made these computers under their iSBC brand. This included processor boards like iSBC 86/12 and also MMU boards such as
11211-538: Was named for my daughter." The project began in 1978 as an effort to create a more modern version of the then-conventional design epitomized by the Apple II . A ten-person team occupied its first dedicated office at 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard next to the Good Earth restaurant, and nicknamed "the Good Earth building". Initial team leader Ken Rothmuller was soon replaced by John Couch , under whose direction
11322-422: Was no longer developing Xenix. Xenix System V Release 2.3.1 introduced support for i386, SCSI and TCP/IP . SCO's Xenix System V/386 was the first 32-bit operating system available on the market for the x86 CPU architecture. Microsoft continued to use Xenix internally, submitting a patch to support functionality in Unix to AT&T in 1987, which trickled down to the code base of both Xenix and SCO Unix. Microsoft
11433-402: Was one of the key reasons it emerged as an important teaching and learning tool and has had a broad influence. See § Impact , below. The inclusion of these components did not make the system large – the original V7 UNIX distribution, consisting of copies of all of the compiled binaries plus all of the source code and documentation occupied less than 10 MB and arrived on
11544-543: Was primarily marketed to individual and small and medium-sized businesses as a groundbreaking new alternative to much bigger and more expensive mainframes or minicomputers such as from IBM , that either require additional, expensive consultancy from the supplier, hiring specially trained personnel, or at least, a much steeper learning curve to maintain and operate. Earlier GUI-controlled personal computers were not mass-marketed; for example, Xerox PARC manufactured its Alto workstation only for Xerox and select partners from
11655-435: Was re-branded MacWorks XL as the primary system application, to convert the Lisa into the Macintosh XL . The launch version of Lisa Office System can not be used for programming, requiring the separate development OS called Lisa Workshop to be toggled and booted. Lisa Workshop was also used to develop Macintosh software for its first few years, until a Macintosh-native development system was released. For most of its lifetime,
11766-497: Was rebranded as Macintosh XL. It was given a hardware and software kit, enabling it to reboot into Macintosh mode and positioning it as the high-end Macintosh. The price was lowered yet again, to $ 4,000, and sales tripled, but CEO John Sculley said that Apple would have lost money increasing production to meet the new demand. Apple discontinued the Macintosh XL, leaving an eight-month void in Apple's high-end product line until
11877-408: Was released for it. In its 1983 OEM directory, Microsoft said the difficulty in porting to the various 8086 and Z8000-based machines had been the lack of a standardized memory management unit and protection facilities. Hardware manufacturers compensated by designing their own hardware, but the ensuing complexity made it "extremely difficult if not impossible for the very small manufacturer to develop
11988-573: Was released in 1992 and led to the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects. With the 1994 settlement of a lawsuit brought against the University of California and Berkeley Software Design Inc. ( USL v. BSDi ) by Unix System Laboratories , it was clarified that Berkeley had the right to distribute BSD Unix for free if it so desired. Since then, BSD Unix has been developed in several different product branches, including OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD . Because of
12099-516: Was said to "present several interesting capabilities as an ARPANET mini-host". At the time, Unix required a license from Bell Telephone Laboratories that cost US$ 20,000 for non-university institutions, while universities could obtain a license for a nominal fee of $ 150. It was noted that Bell was "open to suggestions" for an ARPANET-wide license. The RFC specifically mentions that Unix "offers powerful local processing facilities in terms of user programs, several compilers , an editor based on QED ,
12210-528: Was still in use as late as 1995. Unix Early research and development: Merging the networks and creating the Internet: Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet: Examples of Internet services: Unix ( / ˈ j uː n ɪ k s / , YOO -niks ; trademarked as UNIX ) is a family of multitasking , multi-user computer operating systems that derive from
12321-404: Was subsequently adopted by many commercial Unix vendors. In the 1990s, Unix and Unix-like systems grew in popularity and became the operating system of choice for over 90% of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers , as BSD and Linux distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers. In 2000, Apple released Darwin , also a Unix system, which became
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