"Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity." Dennis Ritchie 1941-2011
Unix was created in the late 1960’s by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others. Because of the way it was licensed many different versions and flavors of UNIX have been created and they are not all compatible. It has gained acceptance as the major operating system for use throughout the world. 90% of the worlds fastest computers use some variant of UNIX.
It is not without its detractors. Criticisms of Unix are many.
D.A. Norman writing in 1981 said ‘Unix is a disaster for the casual user. It
fails both on the scientific principles of human engineering and even in just plain
common sense. The motto of the designers of Unix towards the user seems to be "let the
user beware."’.
It has a difficult user interface and cryptic commands and syntax structure which are not self evident. It does not protect the user and a slight syntax error in a command can wreak havoc.
Even one of the creator’s of Unix accepted some of the criticisms as can be seen from his quote at the top.
That said there is an elegance in Unix and it has a fantastic set of tools and commands which vastly enhance what can be done and make it very powerful.
As someone else wrote “UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.” - Doug Gwyn
Most of the criticisms of Unix are now behind us as almost all variants have much better GUI’s which shield the user from massive complexities. MAC OS is a variant of Unix and no one can say that is not intuitive and easy to use. Also with the internet the complexities of any Unix command are only a google search away.
The version of Unix in the Raspberry PI, Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) was created in 2013 and has been developed since then. It is derived from Debian a branch of Unix which was created in 1993. Debian is the most popular branch including derivatives like Ubuntu for use on personal computers and servers. Raspberry PI OS has a GUI (PIXEL [short for Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight]) which shields users from the complexities of Unix.
However for our project we will be using the command structure of Unix which is explained in the text, hopefully without too much difficulty.