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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Android, and other operating systems can trace their lineage back to the early commercial versions of Unix. One of the missing links in that chain, UNIX Fourth Edition, is now ...

Linux, also known as GNU/Linux, is a free, UNIX-like operating system, developed originally for home PCs, but which now runs on practically every hardware platform available including PowerPC, ...

One is the world's oldest Linux distro, the other isn't Linux at all. Each delivers superb stability - let's compare.

The Unix operating system has been around for decades, and it and its lookalikes (mainly Linux) are a critical part of the computing world. Apple’s operating system, macOS, is Unix-based, as are ...

On August 25, 1991, a Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds announced a new project. "I'm doing a (free) operating system," he wrote on an Internet messaging system, insisting this ...

In the 1990s and well into the 2000s, if you had mission-critical applications that required zero downtime, resiliency, failover and high performance, but didn’t want a mainframe, Unix was your go-to ...

Unix died because of endless incompatibilities between versions. Linux succeeded on servers and everywhere else because it provided a single open operating system that everyone could use. With the ...