UNIX

2 Pages 608 Words

UNIX has served many different government and scientific entities in the past and continues to be enhanced by software designers in order to better serve customers by being responsive to today’s marketplace. It is obvious that with public demand for internet services, combined with the fact that the internet is UNIX-based, there is no immediate threat to the UNIX operating system. The unique advantage of the UNIX operating system when it was introduced was that it could (and still does) run on dissimilar machines, unheard of prior to 1969. UNIX also can run more than one program at a time, store complex graphics and databases, and link to other UNIX and mainframe computer systems, including DOS since the late 1980s. UNIX-based systems control various programs written by many companies to distribute information between multiple computers within the network. UNIX at first worked over ARPnet the ARPA network grew throughout the 1970s when computer networks from various organizations, both nationally and internationally, began to link to ARPAnet, mostly for transferring engineering and scientific research data. The ARPAnet eventually migrated into what we know as the World Wide Web. The Web allows users to easily browse through hypertext and multimedia located on various computers and mainframe systems around the world. Prior to the CERN project, Internet users had to know UNIX programming language and move around in a cumbersome UNIX shell environment. The Web can best be described as a “global interactive, dynamic, cross-platform, distributed, graphical hypertext information system that operates over the Internet. It operates on many protocols, including FTP, Gopher, UseNet, WAIS databases, and TELNET. Most of the text transferred over the Internet is written in hypertext markup language (HTML). Graphics are transferred via standard generalized markup language (SGML) through the UNIX operating system. No one owns the web, but a...