About the Unix family

  • Unix was originally developed at AT&T as a multitasking system for minicomputers and mainframes in the 1970’s

  • it has since grown to become one of the most widely-used operating systems anywhere

  • two major variation: System V (Unix System laboratories, USL) and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD Unix)

  • then many other flavours of these two (Solaris, AIX, Linux, ...)

  • the POSIX standardization by IEEE can be seen also as a third Unix variation