Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®, sometimes also written as Unix or
Unix® with small caps) is a computer
operating system
originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT& employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson,
Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches,
developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit organizations.
As of 2007, the owner of the trademark UNIX® is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium.
Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX®"
(others are called "Unix system-like" or "Unix-like").
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Unix's influence in academic circles led to large-scale
adoption of Unix (particularly of the BSD variant, originating from the University of California,
Berkeley) by commercial startups, the most notable of which is Sun Microsystems. Today, in addition
to certified Unix systems, Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD are commonly encountered.
Sometimes, "traditional Unix" may be used to describe a Unix or an operating system that has the
characteristics of either Version 7 Unix or UNIX System.
Linux is a Unix-like computer
operating system.
Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development;
typically all underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone.
The name "Linux" comes from the kernel, started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The system's utilities
and libraries usually come from the GNU operating system, started in 1983 by Richard Stallman.
The GNU contribution is the reason for the alternative name GNU/Linux.
Predominantly known for its use in servers, Linux is supported by corporations such as Dell,
Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Oracle Corporation, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. It is used
as an operating system for a wide variety of computer hardware, including desktop computers,
supercomputers, video game systems, such as the
PlayStation 2 and
PlayStation 3,
several arcade games, and embedded devices such as
mobile phones and routers.
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