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Is UNIX An OS?
gwernol writes: "David Every has an interesting article over at MacWeek that asks the question: is UNIX an OS? Before you jump off the deep end, read the article. It's actually a pretty good discussion of what components a modern OS needs beyond a kernel and a shell. It also discusses Mac OS X, the forthcoming 'UNIX++' from Apple." At the very least, it should inspire some decent conversation.
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I would guess that the number of applications which require access to disk storage (or benefit from a file abstraction, a la sockets, FIFOs, unix "special files", etc) outnumber those which require a pixel addressable display by several orders of magnitude.
For the minute, accept the definition that an OS should provide an abstraction of the machine's hardware. Imagine I write an OS which is lacking a file system, and other groups pick up my (GPL) OS and start releasing their own OSes, all incompatible with each other. Arguably, what I have written is not a complete OS, but the foundations to write a OS on top of - as it does not provide an abstraction of the hardware.-
However, just for the sake of argument, let's pretend a GUI is a necessary component of an OS. Does a window manager, four xterms, and netscape count?
Yes.Okay, calm down, I just said that to freak you out. But seriously, uh... maybe. Is bash part of UNIX? Virtual terminals? What ls, cd, and rm? If we accept for a minute that the GUI is the appropriate abstraction of modern graphics hardware.... well I'm sure you can see where I'm going with window managers / virtual terminals. In a GUI based OS, the browser is increasingly taking over the jobs that ls/cd/rm performed.
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I don't really want to have to waste precious disk space, memory and CPU time on useless stuff like file managers, desktop icons, and 50 different confusingly named "control panel" doohickies none of which provide any more than the most basic of configuration options, but I don't know what I'll do if I find out that my computer isn't running an OS anymore.
Sorry. It's a shame, isn't it-
[...and I'm already pulling my hair out over that previously very useful machine sitting in the corner with no keyboard or monitor attached. On the other hand, that it does all it does without the benefit of an OS is an absolute technological wonder.]
Bejesus, it's a miracle!Mmmmm, I did think about this one, and you can take it further, saying does a headless server need a gui, does a linux dedicate router, firewall, or X-terminal need a filesystem? So is a filesystem part of an OS?
But this is where I feel you get to the crux of the question {... and here it's going to get even more subjective, and I'll piss you off even more :-) ...} If you accept that an OS should provide an abstraction of the hardware, then you cannot simply a list of features an say 'an OS must contain these'. What constitutes an OS depends what hardware it is running on. That is why you can argue that UNIX once was a workstation/PC OS, but no longer is.
cheers,
G
Oh, Christ, more of the anti-Mac bias (or is it just anti-!Linux bias?) evident so often on Slashdot... As someone who's programmed for the Mac OS, yes, there are a lot of stupid things about it, but it also has the best UI around.
/etc. XML-formatted property lists... Drool...
What's really important in an OS depends on what you're using it for. Using the current Mac OS for a server would be just plain stupid (which is probably why my company is doing it), just like making an average user use Linux+fvwm would also be stupid. (Dodging rocks thrown by Gnome fanatics) Linux and Unix simply don't have a good GUI yet. The Mac OS does, and has for a very long time. Just as Unix has been refined and polished with time, so has the Mac UI. Understand and accept that, and you'll make the step from zealot to rational human being.
That being said, you missed the point of the article completely. The author is using the changes in the computer world's landscape (move towards personal computers from mainframes) to make what may appear to be a purely symmantic distinction. His real point is that there's now more to an OS than just a good kernel and some utilities.
GUI will make or break you for the average user. They don't care if their apps don't crash if they can't launch them in the first place. Apple understands this, and has filled Mac OS X with Ooey GUI Goodness (tm). For the rest of us (no, not them, us with the clue), OS X just happens to have a very solid foundation. They've also started an effort to clean up the mess of dissimilar config files that is
All of my servers run linux without X and without a monitor... am i running os less servers?
This is what's called arguing from the particular to the general. It's not logically valid. By your argument, it there is some part of the kernel that's not used on someone's system, then it's not part of the OS. Is telnet part of the OS? You don't need to have it or networking at all for that matter. Just because you don't use it on your system doesn't mean it's not part of the OS.
To break out of Anti-Microsoft dimension, it's important to note that Apple has always had a unique view of the "operating system", and those views are still harbored by the userbase today.
In the early days, Macs didn't even have an operating system from the marketing perspective. It was just the Macintosh Hardware/Software System that happened to have System file 4.12 installed. The term "MacOS" wasn't official until the cloning era.
Apple takes great pride that they were the first people to see that "policy" in a mainstream OS is a value add for most users, and furthermore, they did it right. The users now have this expectation from other OSes.
The pre-monopoly Microsoft view was probably just a sheepish copy of Apple's attitude, and the current monopoly Microsoft is tied up with economic tying and legal reasoning, as you say.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
But to make a better point...
Many people did and do find a kernel and a shell productive witout the bundled utilities that make the OS more user friendly. That is what the various GUI's do, they abstract the OS to make the OS appealing to those who do not understand the underpinnings of the technology.
Perhaps OS could be defined as the "bare minimum" requirements for making a computer usable. This would support the author's ideology of OS, and still makes Unix an OS. To say that an OS isn't an OS without (God, now I'm laughing...) "Control Panels and Extensions" (tee hee, silly Mac boy) is simply lunacy. These abstractions simplify the user experience, but do not add a thing to the usability of a computer. (the OS, but not the computer itself) Indeed, monkeying around with the various "Control Panels" in the various OSes is an abstraction that can be quite dicey. These abstractions spare us the pain of handwriting Xconfigs, manually editing registrys to add hardware, etc..., but in no way do they benefit the computer itself. They are really nothing more that glorified text processors with very narrow usage abilities. The "Add New Hardware Wizard" is nothing more than an abstraction to regedit.
The purpose of an OS lies in storage and retrieval, input and output. Libraries add in math functions on a human readable level etc..., but the kernel is well capable of math before the libraries are included. The user is simply not capable of expressing that in computer terms.
The entire Idea of OS X is a Mac look and feel abstraction to *nix. As is XF86Setup, as is any installation program. The OS does not truly benefit from these abstractions, only the user does. Much as a web browser is a glorified "rcp" and a www.netscape.com is an abstraction of 207.200.83.93. (even that is an abstraction of a bunch of "0"'s and "1"'s.) (wich is an abstraction of... you get the point...) From a strictly OS point of view, all these abstractions do is waste precious (and copious) memory and clock cycles.
These abstractions can be layered on top of an OS much like voice recognition is an abstraction of keyboard input. Get voice input, translate to text, feed to shell. Our poor author cannot see the OS for the abstractions.
If he truly wanted to market OS X, he could simply say "The power of Unix with the ease of use of a Mac."
make xconfig ; #Now there's an OS! (Why won't it compile??)
~Hammy
It seems that the main reason that the article states for Unix not being an OS is that they believe that the "User Experience" is part of the OS. Personally, I disagree.
An OS is what lies closest to the hardware, and allows the programs themselves to deal with the "User Experience". However, this article being written by a Mac person (and I not saying this is bad), they assume that the interface and such must be part of the OS. I don't think it needs to be, and in fact, I don't think it SHOULD be. But that is just me.
Anyways: just because Unix doesn't assume everybody should be forced into the same "User Experience" doesn't make it somehow less of an OS.
But that is just my opinion.
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
a text based interface or access via telnet is not enough of an interface
a computer is NOT a computer without a monitor (i think servers are computers
basically just because people are used to flashier and more complex interfaces doesn't mean that a system which fundamentally works off of text interfaces (considering that CDE/KDE/Gnome/X11 are not part of the os) is not an os.
All of my servers run linux without X and without a monitor... am i running os less servers?
the term operating system must be redifined to deal with the context with which it is used, ie. are we discussing a desktop or server environment? will it be used for development or multimedia purposes...
About the only solid opinion you'll find about what an OS is comes from the unix purists he comments on. They feel that the OS is the kernel, drivers, libraries, and that's it. Ask anyone else with some competancy and they'll draw the line anywhere from the kernel all the way out to whatever comes on a CD from the distributor.
Hey, if he feels that all the 'traditional' stuff, plus whatever new goodies people have come to expect, should be lumped together and considered an OS, then ducky for him. It's a totally relative distinction.
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
This is a very interesting way to define operating system. I have always thought of an operating system as the fundamental set of software componants which mediate, support and enable the applications running on a system. I suppose one could make the football (soccer, for Americans) analogy: I would call the Field, Rules, and Officials the OS of football. By the definition used in the article, Windows would not be an operating system (for me, at least) without rendering software installed... otherwise I cannot be productive with it. That doesn't feel quite right, as definitions go.
Of course, reading through the rest of the article makes it clear why the whole question of what precisely constitutes an operating system becomes clear: Marketing OSX. (Yes, I know I should have guessed that just from the link, but hey, I'm an optimist).
The message there is about as clear as they come. Now, I'm not saying that the sentiment is actually wrong -- it may very well be that OS X is the greatest thing since gcc -- but I'm not really sure that I appreciate the way the point is being made. It almost seems to prey on the ignorance of consumers. There is bound to be a long and involved argument here on /. regarding what exactly an OS is, and I'm willing to bet that the average Mac & PC users in the world wouldn't even be able to follow most of it. So, essectialy, the author is using buzzwords (UNIX is becoming one even in the mainstream) and creative premises to make an almost unrelated point.
Journalism at it's finest.
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Behold the Power of Cheese!
I just read the article and most of it can be summed up in this quote from it
Unix is no longer an operating system. An operating system is the software that comes with a computer (or OS distribution) that programmers and users need to make themselves productive.
Anybody with a degree in CS (or anyone who's ever taken a college level intro to computing class) knows that this is not the definition of an OS. To put it simply an operating system is that is initially loaded when the computer is booted and manages the system resources as well as the other programs running on the computer.
The operating system's tasks include determining which applications should run, in what order and how much time should be allowed for each application before giving another application a turn, it also manages the sharing of internal memory among multiple applications, it handles input and output to and from attached hardware devices, such as hard disks, printers, and dial-up ports, it sends messages to the applications or the user about the status of operation and any errors that may have occurred.
Since Unix performs all these tasks it is an OS. Case closed
PS: Simply because Operating Systems now come with lots of applications bundled does not mean that the lack of a popularly bundled application (e.g. text editor) suddenly makes an operating system any less of an OS.
Hanlon's Razor
I think that the author gets one big point but misses another. He is correct that today an operating system is generally considered to contain more than just a kernel and a shell. What he misses is that Unix has grown more expansive in exactly the way that he suggests. For instance, he comments that a real OS needs to have "hundreds of utilities". That's exactly what Unix provides; most people think of grep, sed, awk, find, ps, etc. as being essential parts of Unix even though they obviously aren't part of the shell or kernel. Similarly, X11R6 is a key part of Unix as it is now perceived.
This is, IMO, a big part of the reason that Mac OSX won't be Unix even though it's based on underlying Unix technology. It doesn't incorporate all of the other stuff that's really part of Unix as it is understood to be, so the use of a Unix kernel doesn't make it Unix.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Sun's commercial motivations helped make Unix a much more stable OS--for example, it created the Network Filing System (NFS)
:-)
More stable? He clearly doesn't remember the bad old days of Sun's first attempts at NFS
The author does make a good argument for a change in semantics for the term OS. He derides the purist computer sci people who still claim the OS is nothing more than the kernel and a shell. He is taking a luser^H^H^H^Hconsumer oriented view of computers.
He is trying to change the semantics of a term with a long history. When refering to the unix world, the OS is just the kernel and a handful of required utilities. But did you ever stop and think what is the OS part of windoze NT or MacOS? On the Mac, it is the system file, the finder application (a shell), and the extensions which load at boot time (modules and drivers). Similarly, NT could be trimmed down to just a bare core of applications and drivers, but nobody ever does it.
When was the last time you put just a kernel and a shell on a machine? Didn't you also add dozens or hundreds of useful applications and utilities? With NT, tons of stuff gets loaded, you don't have a choice. The same with the Mac.
In the linux world, we use the term distribution to indicate our preference for a particular flavor of OS. We run redhat, debian, or slack, not just the 2.3 kernel with bash and a serial driver.
So maybe the author has a good point, the OS is now more than just the kernel. But changing the purists is a battle of similar proportions to changing the mass media's usage of hacker to include all infocriminals. A good fight, but in the end a futile one.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
- Unix is no longer an operating system. An operating system is the software that comes with a computer (or OS distribution) that programmers and users need to make themselves productive.
A vegetable is a small blue cube. Therefore a carrot is not a vegetable.My point is that if you redefine word as you wish, you can cheerfully prove that anything is, or is not, an OS.
Okay, so my books on OSes are a few thousand miles away at the minute, but as i recall, Andy Tannenbaum's definition of an operating system had 2 requirements:
- Resource Management: an OS should allow multiple user processes to share the processor(s), memory, network connection, etc.
- Extended machine: an OS should provide an richer abstraction of the underlying hardware, providing user programs with useful functionality & abstraction, eg. the ability to handle files, rather than blocks on the hard disk.
UNIX, and specificly POSIX OSes certainly still provide the first of these, but perharps not the second. A useful abstraction of the graphics card must today offer more than POSIX does (ie text mode only). To some extent, the fact that UNIX does not have a standard, built in, GUI means that it is no longer an OS.cheers,
G
But not for any of the rather dumb reasons suggested in the article . . .
Unix isn't a single piece of software, or single set of software components - it's a culture, and an ideology. That's why there are so many different versions of Unix - because it _isn't_ a single chunk of code, anyone who wants to can reimpliment their own version, and do things a little differently, or whatever.
Linux is part of the Unix culture. FreeBSD is part of the Unix culture. Solaris is part of the Unix culture. Irix, HP-UX, AIX, even A/UX, they're all part of this culture.
So yes, Unix isn't an Operating System. Any particular instantiaion of the Unix Ideal _is_ an operating system, even in the rather pointless sense that's used by this article, but that instantiation _is not Unix_ - it's merely one possible version.
And I'd hate to say it, but I suspect that Apple will become part of the Unix culture, too - Unix seems to be rather . . . contagious . . . Once you know it, once you become acculturated(sp?), it tends to subsume just about everything else . . .
himi
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But, since Apple is now adopting Unix as a foundation for OS X, we will be hearing the Mac evangelists tell us how all this stuff that Unix has is really great, but it's not REALLY an operating system unless you have all the extra stuff that Apple adds.
Of course, looking at his definition of an operating system, we can easily conclude that until OS X, the Macintosh never actually HAD an operating system... where is the basic stuff like pre-emptive multi-tasking? So what was all those pre-OS X Macs? Toys??? I doubt that any serious Mac user would agree with that.
Instead of putting down Unix as "not an entire operating system," why not just say that just an operating system in and of itself is probably not what the majority of most users want.
Looking at the corporate environment, a computer just isn't useful unless it has some of the things that were mentioned: An operating system (of course), a GUI, networking, a web browser, and APPLICATIONS, including Word Processing, and whatever else is needed in order to get work done.
If all this is provided by one vendor, then you have a "one stop shopping" solution that some corporate mindsets find attractive. This is one of the reasons that Microsoft has been successful in the PC market.
But as long as all of these things are available, then any environment -- Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, Tru64 Unix, and the others -- should serve the needs of most people.
But, of course, this doesn't say that OS X is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and so wouldn't be printed in such a forum. [shrug]
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"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"