Unix, which is not an
acronym, was developed by some of the members of the Multics team at the bell labs starting in the late
1960's by many of the same
people who helped create the C programming language. The Unix today,
however, is not just the work of a couple of programmers. Many
other organizations, institutes and various other individuals
contributed significant additions to the system we now know today.
See additional
Unix
information and variants and information on the Unix
variants page.
Linux ABCs
Developed by Linus Torvalds and
further elaborated by a number of developers throughout the world, Linux
(lee'nuhks/ or /li'nuks/,_not_/li:'nuhks) is a freely available multitasking and multiuser
operating system. From the outset, Linux
was placed under General Public License (GPL).
The system can be distributed, used and expanded free of charge. In this way,
developers have access to all the source codes, thus being able to
integrate new functions easily or to find and eliminate programming
bugs quickly. Thereby drivers for new adapters (SCSI controller,
graphics cards, etc.) can be integrated very rapidly.
See additional Linux
information and variants and information on the Linux
variants page.
MS-DOS vs. Linux / Unix
If you are able to navigate using MS-DOS, you
should be able to quickly pick up on the navigation of Linux and Unix.
In the below chart is a listing of common MS-DOS commands
with their Linux / Unix counterpart.
* In
addition to each of the above explanations, additional information about
a specified command for your Unix or Linux variant can be found by
using the man command.
