1.2 The UNIX Operating System
1.2 The UNIX Operating System
Like DOS and Windows, there’s
another operating system called UNIX. It arrived earlier than the other two,
and stayed back late enough to give us the Internet. UNIX is a giant operating
system, and is way ahead of them in sheer power. It has practically everything
an operating system should have, and several features which other operating
systems never had. Its richness and elegance go beyond the commands and tools
that constitute it, while simplicity permeates the entire system. It runs on
practically every hardware and provided inspiration to the Open Source
movement.
However, UNIX also makes many
demands of the user. It requires a different type of commitment to understand
the subject, even when the user is an experienced computer professional. It
introduces certain concepts not known to the computing community before, and
uses numerous symbols whose meanings are anything but obvious. It achieves
unusual tasks with a few keystrokes, but it takes time to devise a sequence of
them for a specific task. Often, it doesn’t tell you whether you are right or
wrong, and doesn’t warn you of the consequences of your actions. That is
probably the reason why many people still prefer to stay away from UNIX.
Kernighan and Pike (The UNIX
Programming Environment, Prentice-Hall) lamented long ago that “as the UNIX
system has spread, the fraction of its users who are skilled in its application
has decreased.” Many people still use the system as they would use any other
operating system, and continue to write comprehensive programs that have
already been written before. Beginners with some experience in DOS and Windows
think of UNIX in terms of them, quite oblivious of the fact that UNIX has much
more of offer. Though references to DOS/Windows have often been made whenever a
similar feature was encountered, the similarities end there too. You should not
let them get in the way of the UNIX experience.
Comments
Post a Comment