Notes - UNIX I

Tuesday, June 02, 1998
Syllabus given.

Required books:
The Waite Group's UNIX Primer Plus. Second ed. by Waite, Martin and Prata. Published by Sams.
ISBM 0-672-22729-0.

UNIX in a Nutshell. by Daniel Gilly. Published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
ISBN 1-56592-001-5.

UNIX Notes and Lab Guide. by Dr. Tim Gottleber.

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Introduction to an OS

As requested by lp6: UNIX OS Illustration

An OS (Operating System) makes it easier to control the computer's hardware. (It isn't necessarily essential. Remember punch cards?)
The 1st OS was CP/M.
All OSs are hardware dependant due to bus structure, word size, etc.
(UNIX only seems hardware independant because of its great portability.)

An OS is an interface between the user and the hardware.

A kernal is a hardware dependant hardware interface. Once outside the kernal, shells (of various flavors) are "user transparent".

This course will cover the Borne shell (good for scripting) and the C shell (good for user interaction).

History of UNIX

1968 - The start of UNIX - Bell Labs/GE/MIT

Slow computers (about 50 baud/teletype)
All commands are in lowercase. UNIX is case-sensitive.

MULTICS
1968 - Bell labs quit MULTICS
Leftover MULTICS programmers took a PDP7 and made UNICS to provide a platform on which to run Ken Thompson's "Space Travel" game. UNICS became UNIX (unk. who made the change).
PDP-7 (assembler)
PDP-11/20 (assembler)
PDP-11/45 (Assembler, BAL) - 1970
1971 - Dennis Ritchey writes C to write UNIX OS.

1972 - Pipes added.

Thompson is now giving away UNIX OS due to prohibition of selling it (Bell Labs is involved in an anti-trust suit and is prohibited from selling any OS). Gives it to Berkley.

MAN pages (MAN [command] -will show online documentations for command typed) - Online manual. UNIX was also shipped with source code.

Three Rules:

A.K.A. The Unix Philosophy

Write programs or tools to do one thing good (not good for UNIX app. UNIX is better at doing alot of things fairly well).
Write programs or scripts to work well together (UNIX is very good for this).
Write programs or tools that communicate in streams of ASCII text because ASCII text is the universal computer lang.

A FILE is a STREAM O' BYTES!!
Live it, love it, learn it!!

1973 - 16 sites now running UNIX. Ken Thompson write paper - introduces UNIX to the world.
1974 - Burkley made alot of changes and caused the first split:

SYSTEM V (AT&T;)

BELL LABS

BSD (Berkley Standard Distribution)

Several more splits occurred.
1979 - Version VII - a 32 bit OS.

<1994 - Lenix Torvol (sp??) wrote LINUX kernal and published it on the Internet. GNU Software - copyleft: you can have it, modify it, give it away but you can not sell it.

www.gnu.org (?)
Source codes, tools, etc. to run in LINUX - all free (also new KORN shell) are found here.

There are 2 problems with Linux:

Still alot of public hesitation for freeware (If it's free, it must not be any good).
Worries about lack of support (though support is growing).
Lack of applications written for alt. OS.
Cobol Cube runs LINUX.
Bell sold their UNIX rights to Novell. Novell couldn't keep it going, so they sold it to SCULL (?) Other sold flavors are getting killed by Linux, other free flavors. LINUX will be it.

Networking

UUCP - UNIX to UNIX Copy Protocol
ID & ETTCY Password
cn6

User ID: 608

Home dir: /home/clyde/cn6:/bin/csh

(csh - C Shell)

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Lefthand refers to The Waite Group's UNIX Primer Plus - Sams.
Primer refers to UNIX In A Nutshell - O'Reilly & Associates.

Last Updated: Thursday, June 11, 1998 at 4:40 PM