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.