UNIX and Open System

748 Words2 Pages

For UNIX truly to be an open system, The Open Group provides certification and standardization for UNIX-like operating system, thus regardless of different UNIX-like environment the standards set by The Open Group are the same, therefore it helps eliminate confusion and achieve consensus among the various interests of the members of the standards-forming bodies. Several standards have come about as the direct result of computer users’ desire to see UNIX standardized and to see it evolve in a direction compatible with present use as well as future needs. Standards are at the basis of the concept of open systems (Dunphy 1991, 44).
POSIX®
Portable Operating System Interfaces for Computing Environment, POSIX for short and it also known as, IEEE Std 1003.1. The standard was originally developed, in order to improve the portability of UNIX environment applications. It is a programmatic level interface core standard for portable operating systems and was created by a number of a different committees organized through the aegis of the IEEE. The POSIX standard provides source-level C language API to the operating system. Nevertheless, POSIX is not limited to UNIX or UNIX-like environment, many other operating systems, such as DEC, OpenVMS and Microsoft Windows NT support the POSIX standard, particularly the POSIX.1 version. POSIX.1 has been recognized and accepted by the ISO, Therefore POSIX.1 also known as ISO / IEC 9945-1:1990 standards.

POSIX refers collectively to a number of standard specifications. At the time of writing, the latest specification for POSIX is POSIX.1-2008 or IEEE Std 1003.1-2008.1. The standard was approved by IEEE as a full-use standard. It also been made a requirement for U.S. government tenders.

http://pubs.ope...

... middle of paper ...

...er expect, such as text editors and formatters electronic mail facilities and network protocols. AND UNIX is a software development environment. It was written by programmers for programmers, and has many sophiscated programming tools. Writing new applications is well supported and the system supports applications of every kind. (Quarterman and Wihelm 1993)
UNIX was distributed via source code, which permitted user to fix bugs on the spot. Since it originally came without support or updates, “required” might be more accurate than “permitted.” This also permitted many variants, which has led to much user confusion. But those variants allowed faster evolution than might otherwise have been possible. Many important features such as virtual memory, multiple terminal support, and networking, were first added by organization outside of AT&T (Quarterman and Wihelm 1993)

Open Document