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 ...

People who have had bad experiences on Windows disks that performed poorly after they had become very fragmented often wonder if they need to apply some kind of periodic analysis and defragmentation ...

GUIs are great—we wouldn’t want to live without them. But if you’re a Mac or Linux user and you want to get the most out of your operating system (and your keystrokes), you owe it to yourself to get ...

This November, the Unix community has another notable anniversary to celebrate: the 40th birthday of the first edition of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie’s Unix Programmers Manual, released in ...

Windows users who dive into *nix without first researching the operating system are in for quite a shock. The complete lack of a C:\ drive can send Windows switchers into a tailspin. Thankfully, IBM ...

Maybe its pervasiveness has long obscured its origins. But Unix, the operating system that in one derivative or another powers nearly all smartphones sold worldwide, was born 50 years ago from the ...

We caught up with the pioneers who brought us the Unix operating system and asked them to share some memories of the early days of Unix development. Unix co-developer Ken Thompson worked at Bell Labs ...