-
-
Being very 'mainstream'- i.e. going from Windows to Mac - I've never understood about Unix and Linux. Anyone care to explain in layperson's terms? (And full respects to Dennis Ritchie en passant).It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. -
I'm sure there are more knowledgeable techies who can summarise this better, but one comparison between Unix and the Windows operating system is that Unix is more of a distributed rather than a monolithic system (federal rather than centralised), with lots of applications co-ordinated by a relatively small central scheduler. The philosophy was to have multiple applications each of which did a particular job, rather than one huge application doing everything, and the power of each of those applications could be increased by combining them. The wiki entry mentions a description of this philosophy as being "the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves".
I had to learn about the Unix OS in connection with work in the 1980s, and it did strike me as an elegantly designed and powerful system (something I don't think you could ever say about any Microsoft OS). The Apple OS is also Unix-based.
Dennis Ritchie deserves to be remembered for his achievement just as much as Steve Jobs, but somehow I doubt he will be.Comment
Comment