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 ...

Look at almost any mission-critical computer system in the world—servers, workstations, embedded computers, and many more—and ...

Back on September 12, fellow blogger Marc Wagner wrote a long rebuttal to my comment that the Linux community should stop trying to make Linux look like Windows and just let Linux be Linux. As part of ...

MacOS and Windows are the two most popular desktop and laptop operating systems. They’re the two central OS choices dominating the desktop and laptop markets today. But have you heard of the ...

Takeaway: Unix’s rock-solid reliability means that its relevant now more than ever – and Linux puts Unix’s power within reach. Unix has been around for a very long time. We remember the rampant ...

Unix died because of endless incompatibilities between versions. Linux succeeded on servers and everywhere else because it ...

I'm not gonna lie: I don't give FreeBDS (or any of the BSDs) the attention they deserve. The reason for that is simple: I'm a Linux guy. But isn't FreeBSD Linux? It looks like Linux, it smells like ...

It probably shouldn’t, but it routinely astonishes me how much we live on the Web. Even I find myself going entire boots without using anything but the Web browser. With such an emphasis on Web-based ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

The basic idea is that it is Unix if it acts like Unix, regardless of the underlying code. A still broader definition of Unix would include Unix-like operating systems — sometimes called Unix “clones” ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...