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October 20, 2004

TechTip: The State of the Demon Address

Real Unixphiles should be very interested in an article at MacSlash with the same name as this article. MacSlash is mirroring a post (from a slashdotted site) which runs through the current state of the BSD Unix market (real Unix - or as close to it as you can get).

[Aside for the newbies: Real Unix(tm) came from Bell Labs (later AT&T). The versions were named after editions of the manual: Version 1 .. Version 7*. Due to the normal academic need to fiddle, most universities added their own extensions. Many of these were bundled into the BSD (Berkley Software Distribution) - including code from UNSW (where I was studying). Later there was a fight between AT&T about Unix (BSD won). Commercial versions of Unix were forked from one (BSD led to SunOS) or the other (AT&T led to Solaris, AIX, HP/UX) or sometimes even from both (Pyramid had a dual-universe environment). The closest thing to the original Unix, in spirit and in practice would have to be one of the BSD family of operating systems. Note that BSD is exempt from the current SCO-stupidity due to the earlier court case. Also note that Linux is not included because it was not derived from an existing Unix variant.]

Anyway, the four current versions of BSD Unix are all included. Four? I know some of you are scratching your heads. Everyone can remember FreeBSD (great driver support), NetBSD (runs on everything including the kitchen sink) and OpenBSD (most paranoid secure). What is the fourth one?

Here's a little clue: it actually outsells all of the other BSD variants. In fact it is probably the number one Unix version shipped (over 10 million users).

Need another hint?

It's called Darwin.

[* I have worked on Version 6 and 7.]

Posted by Ozguru at October 20, 2004 06:00 AM