Unix ... "It's Everywhere Man"

Johnny Cash once sang a song called “I've Been Everywhere, Man” and the chorus of the song lists all the places he has visited on his travels:-

I've been to:

Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota,

Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota,

Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma,

Tampa, Panama, Mattawa…..etc

Developed in the 1970s, Unix was primarily used in Universities and it was not until the 1980s with servers and workstations from companies like Sun, that it became commercially prevalent.  In the 90s HP, IBM and Silicon Graphics, entered the market with their own version of Unix on proprietary hardware. For the next 10-15 years these companies all competed to try and outdo each other.

Around this time a young Finnish software engineer named Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel and made it available to the world for free. He invited others to add to the kernel provided that they keep their contributions free. As such Linux gained a dedicated following with thousands of programmers developing the code. Seen as the reserve of hobbyists and bit twiddlers, Linux certainly was not considered a rival to the likes of Sun, IBM and HP, however, it had one distinct advantage over the others in that it did not require proprietary hardware and would  run on pretty much any Intel x86 PC to Server.

For those who did not want to run freeware, along came Enterprise Linux. This is a term used to reference any distribution of an open source Linux operating system that is packaged for the commercial market. Some of the different Enterprise Linux distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Oracle Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLES).

These days Linux runs on just about any hardware you can name, from Android - an operating system based on the Linux kernel for mobile phones - to supercomputers. Most firewalls and virtualisation software such as VMware are based on Linux. The open source nature of the kernel and software means it can be ported to any architecture and, as such, has replaced the proprietary versions of the big players with the exception of IBM’s AIX. 

So if you think Unix is only for nerds, the fact of the matter is you’re already using it because Unix is …“Everywhere, Man “

For further information on Unix, please do not hesitate to contact Celerity Limited.

Neil Hulme, Technical Consultant, Celerity Limited