UNIX and Windows

UNIX and Windows

About Unix

The Unix operating system is a powerful programming environment designed by and for computer programmers. Unix is available on a wide variety of computer systems, including personal computers, workstations, mainframes and supercomputers. It was developed for, and is particularly well suited to, multi-user systems, but is now also run on 'stand-alone' machines.

Beginners and casual users often find the jargon-filled help system frustrating and the lack of icons and menus unfriendly.

Unix was first developed in the early 1970s at Bell Laboratories in the USA. It was originally developed as a system to be used by the staff in the laboratories, and it was principally intended to provide an operating system that people would enjoy using. It was designed for users who were largely computer scientists, which may explain some of the more arcane and apparently unfriendly features of Unix, such as the obscure sounding command names. AT&T (the owners of Bell Laboratories) made Unix available at nominal cost to academic users, with whom it became popular. This helped to create a market for Unix, at a time when technological changes had themselves created a need for a portable multi-user operating system. As a result Unix began to be adopted by non-academic users in the 1980's, as it became commercially available. Several standards are now being worked out, and Unix is steadily becoming the standard operating system in many environments.

Unix has the following advantages: Portability Unix is written in the high level language C. This makes it easy to install on new computing systems. Applications written to run on a Unix system will hopefully run on any Unix system, regardless of the hardware. Po...

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...y space." NT does not run them in separate memory space by default. This is a manual configuration which should be set for each and every 16-bit application on the machine;

· Certain brands of memory modules or cache will induce this, even though the same hardware runs fine under other operating systems, such as Windows 95.

UNIX does not require a graphical user interface to function. NT does. Anyone knows that graphics require incredible amounts of disk space and memory. The same holds true for sound files, which seem to be so important to the Microsoft operating systems.

Conclusion.

Microsoft's NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition can't hold a candle to the more mature commercial UNIX operating systems. Although not essential to network performance, 64-bit computing is here today with these UNIX operating systems (as opposed to NT's 32-bit operating system).