Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix in small caps) is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T; employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, Michael Lesk and Joe Ossanna. The Unix operating system was first developed in assembly language, but by 1973 had been almost entirely recoded in C, greatly facilitating its further development and porting to other hardware. Today’s Unix system evolution is split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T; as well as various commercial vendors, universities (such as University of California, Berkeley’s BSD), and non-profit organizations.
The Open Group, an industry standards consortium, owns the UNIX trademark. Only systems fully compliant with and certified according to the Single UNIX Specification are qualified to use the trademark; others might be called Unix system-like or Unix-like,…