ABSTRACT

The Unix™ 1 operating system is used on a wide variety of computers (including but not limited to most workstation-class machines made by Sun, Hewlett-Packard, MIPS, NeXT, DEC, IBM 2 , and many others), in one or another version. If one is around computers almost anywhere, one is within reach of a computer running Unix. Indeed, more often than not Unix is the only choice available for many computing tasks like e-mail, number-crunching, or running file servers and Web sites. One of the reasons for the ubiquity of Unix is that it is the most influential operating system in history; it has strongly affected, and contributed features and development philosophy to, almost all other operating systems.