Datasheet

Chapter 1: An Overview of Red Hat Linux 7
UNIX, on the other hand, grew out of a culture where technology was king and marketing
people were, well, hard to find. Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was a think tank
where ideas came first and profits were somebody else’s problem. A quote from Dennis
Ritchie, co-creator of UNIX and designer of the C programming language, in a 1980 lecture on
the evolution of UNIX, sums up the spirit that started UNIX. He was commenting on both his
hopes and those of his colleagues for the UNIX project after a similar project called Multics
had just failed:
What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do
programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew
from experience that the essence of communal computing as supplied by
remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a
terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.
In that spirit, the first source code of UNIX was distributed free to universities. Like Linux, the
availability of UNIX source code made it possible for a diverse population of software
developers to make their own enhancements to UNIX and share them with others.
By the early 1980s, UNIX development moved from the organization in Murray Hill to a more
commercially oriented development laboratory in Summit, New Jersey (a few miles down the
road). During that time, UNIX began to find commercial success as the computing system of
choice for applications such as AT&T’s telephone switching equipment, for supercomputer
applications such as modeling weather patterns, and for controlling NASA space projects.
Major computer hardware vendors licensed the UNIX source code to run on their computers.
To try to create an environment of fairness and community to its OEMs (original equipment
manufacturers), AT&T began standardizing what these different ports of UNIX had to be able
to do to still be called UNIX. To that end, compliance with POSIX standards and the AT&T
UNIX System V Interface Definition (SVID) were specifications UNIX vendors could use to
create compliant UNIX systems. Those same documents also served as road maps for the
creation of Linux.
Today, Linux continues to aim toward POSIX compliance, as well as compliance with
standards set by the new owner of the UNIX trademark, The Open Group
(
http://www.unix-systems.org/).
Common Linux Features
No matter what version of Linux you use, the piece of code common to all is the Linux kernel.
Although the kernel can be modified to include support for the features you want, every Linux
kernel can offer the following features:
• Multiuser — Not only can you have many user accounts available on a Linux system,
you can also have multiple users logged in and working on the system at the same time.
Users can have their own environments arranged the way they want: their own home