tech options

UNIX Rules!
Consider UNIX as viable NT alternative

By Theo Gantos

Windows NT is garnering lots of press lately. It gives one the impression that the entire world is moving to NT. Microsoft is doing a good job of marketing the product but it falls short for mid to large enterprise-wide installations. (See NT Mistakes- The Paper 3/4/98). There are other options available to organizations other than NT. This week we’ll focus on the operating system known as UNIX. First, some history is in order.
UNIX is the generic term for the operating system which was initially developed at AT&T’s Bell Labs by Ken Thompson in 1969. The DEC PDP11 minicomputer was the machine that really helped UNIX take off during the early 70’s. Throughout the 70’s and early 80’s UNIX systems sprang up at universities because AT&T made UNIX freely available to Universities and other non-profit institutions. It was a difficult system to learn but could be very powerful, allowing programmers to string together modular programs using the operating system as a conduit.
By the late 70’s a rival to AT&T UNIX emerged out of the University of California at Berkeley. Berkeley UNIX, known as BSD, for Berkeley Software Distribution, was also developed partly by Ken Thompson. This was an effort to get around AT&T’s ownership of UNIX, add new capabilities and provide an alternative to AT&T, which was going commercial. A good deal of the early Internet ran on BSD UNIX due to its vastly improved networking capabilities. Microsoft released XENIX in 1980, a UNIX clone that ran on the forerunner of today’s PC’s, the 8086 processor.
The 1980’s was a decade of growth and standardization. AT&T, freed from governmental restraint by the breakup in 1981, introduced System V (System 5) in 1983 as a commercial product. Sun Microsystems began selling powerful workstations running their own brand of UNIX. Sun, Berkeley, and AT&T worked together to merge their different flavors of UNIX into System V release 4 (or SVR4). They founded a group known as UI or UNIX International, to license and distribute a standard UNIX known as POSIX. IBM, DEC and HP founded the Open System Foundation (OSF) which was a competitor to UI. OSF is based primarily on IBM’s version of UNIX known as AIX. The late 1990’s saw the rebirth of a new generation of UNIX hobbyist programmers (the original meaning for the word hacker). A system named Linux was written and released as an entirely free and public domain UNIX, desiged to run on a variety of hardware types. Linux development is breathing new life and stimulating new development.
The POSIX group has issued specifications that vendors are aiming to comply with. This will help to continue to standardize UNIX in the future.
UNIX primary benefits are its speed, security, reliability, interoperability, networking and flexibility. It is also quite easy to move applications to UNIX from mainframes, minicomputers or PC’s. Many computer companies develop and test programs under UNIX for this reason. UNIX makes the most of the machine because the kernel, or core of the system, is the only part that must be rewritten to move or “port” UNIX to new hardware. Thus, freed from the costs of a massive software development effort, work on the kernel can focus on efficiency and speed. UNIX systems run applications and benchmarks (programs designed to measure hardware speed) the fastest of any OS.
UNIX’s legendary reliability comes from its long history. Over the years, many of the initial quirks and bugs have been discovered and fixed. With so many hackers testing the system over twenty years, security has become very strong as well. Reliability and security are the foundations of any system that will support the sharing of information across the enterprise. IBM’s AIX and DEC’s OSF/1 are both C2 secure under the stringent Department of Defense “red book” guidelines, where Windows NT 3.51 was certified under the “orange book”, which precludes networking. Windows NT 4.0 has not been C2 certified as yet, and hackers are discovering new security holes every day, a system manager’s nightmare. Any system can be made insecure, and UNIX is no exception, but the informed system administrator can setup a UNIX system to be as secure as any mainframe system, certainly more secure than Windows NT.
UNIX systems are among the most reliable made, primarily because the code has been worked out so well over the years. Networking is the core of modern UNIX, providing many features not available with other systems. UNIX systems form the core of the Internet, it is virtually impossible to send email from one organization to another over the Internet without having at least one UNIX system get involved in the delivery. Standardized programs for serving email, conferences, web sites, and even file and print servers are available either as freeware or as off the shelf software. These programs, especially email, are simpler and work far better than Microsoft Exchange or Outlook on NT. Properly setup and maintained UNIX systems can run weeks or even months without a single crash!
The main benefit to UNIX is its interoperability and flexibility. Interoperability means UNIX can connect and communicate with many diverse systems easily, using modular or reusable programs like plastic snap-together plumbing. UNIX systems are very powerful and flexible, commands can be strung together using a technique known as piping. The output of a directory command may be piped through a program to search for a specific group of words or characters. The UNIX shell or command processor can be used to write programs known as shell scripts to add new features and capabilities or bond two or more different programs into a new, unified one. Some people refer to this interoperabilty coupled with UNIX’s hardware and vendor-independent direction as “open-ness”. Open systems are systems based on international standards, not “proprietary” standards controlled by individual vendors. The source code for most types of UNIX is freely available, in contrast with Microsoft’s closely guarded NT code.
Setting up a UNIX system means either getting help from a consultant or system integrator who can put a system together for you or buying a complete package from one of the major computer system vendors such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Digital or IBM. These are all excellent companies that can provide ongoing support and maintenance which are essential to a successful system. So in short, don’t forget UNIX when considering a system for your organization. You may find that UNIX provides an efficient, cost effective, and less risky alternative to Windows NT for your organization.

Theo Gantos is president of TEKA, a technology consulting firm. Contact him: