UNIX: One OS To Rule Them All

CS 321 2007 Lecture, Dr. Lawlor

There's a pretty good, short, readable history of UNIX at unix.org.  Go read it.  It's good.

There's a much longer, more personal story of UNIX by Dennis Richie.  If you have a chance, check it out.

Finally, there's a good UNIX family tree and tour of UNIX creators' beards here.

UNIX doesn't actually do anything amazing not done by other operating systems at the time.  But it was written by some really smart, motivated programmers who wanted the machine to "just work right".  UNIX was developed in portable C (alongside the B and then C languages), because the programmers were tired of porting bigger operating systems written in assembly.  The biggest and most significant design feature of UNIX is the use of "interchangable parts" everywhere in the OS.

Interchangable Parts

Most other operating systems are made of a few, giant programs.  For example, Microsoft Visual C++, and Mac OS Xcode are both huge "Integrated Development Environments".  They've got editors, debuggers, compilers, and a build system all wrapped together into one piece.

There are advantages to this approach.  For example, it's easy to flip between editing and debugging code, since there's just one big program running.

But there are also disadvantages.  For example, if you hate the Visual C++ editor, it's not easy to replace it with another editor.

UNIX development works differently.  Entirely separate programs handle editing (nedit, pico, emacs, vi, ...), debugging (gdb, ddd, TotalView, ...), compiling (g++, icpc, ...), and building (make, ant, jam, ...).  If you want to add your own specialized tool to the list, it's trivially easy, because none of the other tools know about each other.

For example, here's how I write code:
There's a nice little classic-UNIX program for automating the build process called "make".  "make" is controlled by a little text file called a "Makefile".

Basically the above means there's a program "foo".  "foo" depends on "foo.cpp", which needs to be compiled using "g++".  Here's what our Makefile would contain:
foo: foo.cpp
	g++ foo.cpp -o foo
Note that there's a TAB in front of all commands in Makefiles, not a set of spaces!  This whitespace dependence is by far the worst thing about Makefiles.  (slightly longer Makefile tutorial)

List of UNIXes

UNIX-like operating systems today include (the short list):
UNIX-like operating systems today (the not-so-short list):
The general rule: if it's got an "X" in the name of the OS, it's a UNIX machine.

I tend to treat all UNIX machines interchangeably.  Occasionally you'll find some annoying difference between them, but the vast majority of your code will work perfectly on any of these machines.

UNIX Boot Process

A PC starts running UNIX in the boot block, like any PC operating system.  The boot block loads the OS loader, nowadays often GRUB or the older LILO.  The OS loader loads the UNIX kernel, which is the code that runs with the supervisor bit set to kernel mode.  The UNIX kernel then finds the filesystem, and then starts up the first process, which is always called "init" and stored in "/bin/init" or "/etc/init".  On most machines, init then reads /etc/inittab to figure out how to run the startup scripts, which eventually drop you into a GUI (often some flavor of X windows) or a text-based login screen.

This means you can build a new UNIX system by:
That's it.