2 ms·
Unix was a kind of play word for Unique as an anti-thesis for Multics that latter was originally designed for modern multi-user and multi-process OS. Ironically
by teleforce 2y ago
Unix was a kind of play word for Unique as an anti-thesis for Multics that latter was originally designed for modern multi-user and multi-process OS. Ironically as any real-world OS Unix eventually becomes multi-user system similar to Multics but the name stucked. Granted Unix has a very simple (as in simple as possible but no simpler) multi-user permission and security system that work reliably for many decades until now. Of all the organizations NSA actually even come up with a better replacement for the modern Unix permission and security model with SELinux, but most users just ignored and disabled SELinux although it's installed by default by many major Linux distros [1].
[1] SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31176138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31176138
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoI understood it was Unix for 'one mechanism' or 'unified' instead of the broad everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Multix approach. That was the joke I understood. Notthing about single-user.
- pjmlp 2y agoNot something that you can disable on Android, or on properly managed Linux servers, where devs only get what they should touch on.
- musicale 2y ago"We even knew that it had a joke name, Unix, coined by Brian Kernighan, that was a reference to Multics." https://multicians.org/unix.html https://multicians.org/unix.html "Brian Kernighan takes credit for the idea, but adds that 'no one can remember' the origin of the final spelling Unix." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix Also note that Prof. Kernighan has written a historical memoir about Unix: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/ https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/