Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix) is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. The Unix operating system was first developed in assembly language, but by 1973 had been almost entirely recoded in C, greatly facilitating its further development and porting to other hardware. Today's Unix system evolution is split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors, universities (such as University of California, Berkeley's BSD), and non-profit organizations.

The Open Group, an industry standards consortium, owns the UNIX trademark. Only systems fully compliant with and certified according to the Single UNIX Specification are qualified to use the trademark; others might be called Unix system-like or Unix-like, although the Open Group disapproves of this term. However, the term Unix is often used informally to denote any operating system that closely resembles the trademarked system.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix (particularly of the BSD variant, originating from the University of California, Berkeley) by commercial startups, the most notable of which are Solaris, HP-UX and AIX. Among all variants of Unix, Mac OS X is the most widely used, as the underpinnings of Apple's desktop and mobile phone operating systems, followed by Linux, which is used to power data centers, mobile phones, and embedded devices such as routers. Today, in addition to certified Unix systems such as those already mentioned, Unix-like operating systems such as MINIX, Linux, Android, and BSD descendants (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD) are commonly encountered. The term traditional Unix may be used to describe a Unix or an operating system that has the characteristics of either Version 7 Unix or UNIX System V.

Proper noun

UNIX or Unix

1. A computer operating system.
2. A derived work of Unix that qualifies for use of the Unix trademark.
3. (informal, considered incorrect) A Unix-like operating system similar to Unix but not qualifying for use of the Unix trademark. Such systems are not strictly considered Unix but are often commonly described as such informally.

   GNU is not Unix.

4. The group of Unix operating systems as a whole.

• Linux
• GNU Hurd
• Minix

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