On "1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0 Day," tech lovers all over the world celebrated the moment when the clocks in the popular Unix computer operating system struck that exact stream of numbers. But on Feb. 13, ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

Electronics as a hobby and knowledge of the boundaries between hardware and software have long been something too expensive and too obfuscated for most people to access. It hasn’t been until the last ...

What defines an operating system isn’t a geeky label or a collection of ramblings from the mouths of its community members. Nor is it some empty and pointless certification offered up by an obscure ...

Probably not too many people around the world celebrated November 1st, 2023, but on this momentous date FreeBSD celebrated its 30th birthday. As the first original fork of the first complete and open ...

Despite its quirks, 9front is more than just a curiosity. It is a direct descendant of research at Bell Labs, where Unix ...

"The UNIX Operating System" is a documentary that Bell Labs made in 1982 about UNIX's significance, impact and usability. Even 10 years after its first installation, it's still an introduction to the ...

If you're new to the UNIX operating system, especially if you're familiar with Windows, you'll find that the file access control mechanisms might not be exactly what you expect. File permissions and ...

One of the questions that Unix users are sometimes reluctant to ask is how all the directory names — like /etc, /var and /usr/local — came about in the first place. Why did we adopt the particular ...