operating system concepts

What is Unix?

An operating system developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the late 1960's.
In 1978 AT&T's Unix seventh edition was split off into Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).
AT&T SVR5 spawned several other commercial versions of Unix including:
Sun Solaris
HP-UX (Hewlett-Packard)
AIX (IBM)
IRIX (Silicon Graphics)



What is Linux?

A freely available version of the UNIX operating system
Started by Linus Torvalds in 1991
Programmers from around the world contribute code
Main portion of Linux: The Linux Kernel
Can be downloaded from a number of sites (www.linux.org) as well as purchased in packages (called distributions) from companies such as RedHat (www.redhat.com) and Suse (www.suse.com).
Runs on Intel 486, Pentium (and better) processors as well as Sun Sparc, DEC Alpha and dozens of other processors (e.g., Xbox).
Ways of installing/using Linux:
Install Linux on a separate drive or hard drive partition
Boot up and use Linux from a CD-ROM or USB Drive
Run Linux from within another operating system (like Windows) (Consider this version of PenDriveLinux that runs within Windows