PULSE The wealth of information and source code available for Unix kernels make it the perfect place to start considering what an operating system looks like, especially for an integrated platform like the Raspberry Pi.
What is Unix? Unix is a proprietary operating system originally written in the late 1960s. Written at the famous Bell Labs by a group of pioneering engineers, Unix was based around multiple users on the same system— an idea that holds true today. It was eventually rewritten in C and went on to inspire many other operating systems like Linux and BSD, distributions of which are core to the free software movement. Most of our technology runs off of Unix-like operating systems, including most phones, Apple computers, and even some consumer appliances. Figure 1 to the right shows a condensed history of the Unix operating system and of those systems heavily inspired by the original Unix. Because Unix and Unix-like operating systems have been around for so long, there are so many facets to the operating system and many tutorials about how to learn and dive into it. And Unix is unparalleled when attempting to interface hardware and software in a computer. Linux, based upon Unix and released in 1991, is a completely open source kernel— where a kernel is an operating system component that manages the resources of the computer and interfaces the software with the available hardware. The wealth of information and source code available for Unix kernels make it the perfect place to start considering what an operating system looks like, especially for an integrated platform like the Raspberry Pi.
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Figure 1: An Incomplet