Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

An operating system initially developed in the 1960s at Bell Labs. Its developers wrote it in C programming language along with assembly language. The creators of Unix originally intended the ...

The “What’s the difference between UNIX and Linux?” question can be answered similar to the analogy section that many of us had to complete on the SAT test; UNIX is to DOS as Linux is to Windows. That ...

What defines an operating system isn’t a geeky label or a collection of ramblings from the mouths of its community members. Nor is it some empty and pointless certification offered up by an obscure ...

Commercial enterprise UNIX today reminds me of vintage clothes and furniture. Just when you think certain things have become passé in favor of newer more modern things, they are somehow revived and ...

Although many people claim that Linux is well on its way to replacing Unix, the reality is that Linux is Unix: a particular stream within a much wider community whose traditions and ideas both ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

Electronics as a hobby and knowledge of the boundaries between hardware and software have long been something too expensive and too obfuscated for most people to access. It hasn’t been until the last ...

About 300 enterprise IT professionals respond to a Computerworld survey about their plans for Unix and what is the venerable operating system's greatest market threat. See what they said.

Two weeks ago frequent contributors p_msac and bportlock challenged me to see Linux as not Unix and to discuss the consequences of that difference. The reality here is simple: Linus Torvalds started ...