UNIX: Yesterday, today and tomorrow

NEW DELHI, INDIA: For many in the computer industry, UNIX needs no introduction. For the past few decades it is the most prevailing operating system outside of personal computers and has shaped the way modern operating systems are written. The history of UNIX is as interesting as the program itself.

Initial Years - Beards and Suspenders

In 1983, Ken Thompson and D Ritchie received the Turing award for their contributions to the field of Operating System Theory and specifically for UNIX implementation, the most prestigious award in the field of Computer Science. Their journey for creating this had started nearly two decades earlier. In 1964, GE in collaboration with Bell labs and MIT, decided to create an operating system called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (Multics) for Honeywell.

Bell Labs, where Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were working, dropped out of the Multics project in 1969 and the two young computer scientists brought back a lot of ideas and created an operating system which is known as UNIX - the name itself being the pun of "multics".

However, UNIX was designed a fresh and internally somewhat different from Multics. It used very simple and elegant design principles. The very popular C programming language also was developed alongside for UNIX.

Apart from the famous duo, Doug McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna also contributed profoundly to UNIX during the early stages.

UNIX time is considered to be number of seconds elapsed since midnight of UTC of January 1, 1970, that is, all UNIX implementations are measured with reference to this time.

UNIX Today!

The leading UNIX vendors - HP (HP-UX 11i v3), IBM (AIX V5.3), and Sun (Solaris V10) control about 90% of the continuously growing UNIX market. All three conform to the single UNIX standard maintained by the Open Group. All three jockey to introduce technical innovations which are quickly taken up by the others.

The road that led to today's robust and result oriented UNIX market is the interplay between the UNIX customers and the UNIX vendors for the last 20 years.

Once the role of an operating system as a platform to assist the applications in using the hardware resources was established, customers expected UNIX to step into newer and more demanding roles such as better manageability, better resource utilization (Virtualization) and handle unpredictabilities in business.

The UNIX operating system serves as the mission-control point for business critical applications while providing, what today vendors call the elements of the Adaptive Infrastructure;

•    Intelligently virtualized environment with the flexibility to execute initiatives faster and more efficiently - An OS with the richest portfolio of partitioning and virtualization technologies as well as with an automated virtual infrastructure that can adapt in seconds with mission-critical reliability. Enables 100 million zettabytes of storage with the next generation mass storage stack and unified management with TCO savings, up to 30% and energy efficiencies as high as 50%.

•    Continuously available platform engineered for the extreme uptime needs of today’s 24x7 global enterprise – An OS that is engineered for a maximum of 3 seconds of annual downtime while providing layered security with in-depth protection.

•    Dynamically scalable infrastructure designed to meet the demand of real-time business, consistently – An OS that provides superior performance for a connected world—where every millisecond matters and provides you with a choice of scalable platforms – from Blades to Superdomes as well as rich partnerships and delivery models to meet the unique needs of  businesses.

While there could be other key points for selecting the right operating system, these three are absolutely critical. UNIX provides a computing environment that has reliability, availability, security and manageability — all of them are key requirements for running mission-critical workloads. Importantly, as a product that it has been engineered and refined over two decades, UNIX also supports a number of features that simplify and automate operations, which in turn reduces planned and unplanned downtime and addresses operational costs.

UNIX solves today’s business problems with flexible capacity for tomorrow’s most demanding workloads and capacity for even exploding requirements for data.  That lets you spend time on your business, unhindered by technical limitations in your IT environment.

New management capabilities like the Software Assistant (SWA) increases availability and simplifies management. SWA also eases compliance with security regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley, as well.

UNIX servers will keep their place in the datacenter, and in other mission-critical applications demanding mainframe-level reliability and availability.

The Future of UNIX

The next chapter in the glorious UNIX saga will probably be written on handheld devices, connected on the backend to a UNIX server which is self healing and requires very little housekeeping, is what leading vendors call it as "24x7 lights out computing".

Some of the features of this futuristic datacenter would be zero downtime, virtualization, faster and automatic deployment and superior accessibility.

Authors are System Software Engineers working with HP India