Gossip is an instant messaging client for Unix-like operating systems. It uses XMPP protocol and adheres to GNOME’s published human interface guidelines. It is written in the C programming language, and its main developer is Mikael Hallendal, founder of Imendio.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Gossip (software), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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*Cone, a text-based e-mail and news client for Unix-like operating systems

*Cone tracing, a derivative of the ray tracing algorithm that replaces rays, which have no thickness, with cones

*Second-order cone programming a library of routines that implements a predictor corrector variant of the semidefinite programming algorithm

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Cone, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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redirection is a function common to most command-line interpreters, including the various Unix shells that can redirect standard streams to user-specified locations.

In unix-like operating systems programs do redirection with the dup2(2) system call, or its less-flexible but higher-level stdio analogues, freopen(3) and popen(3).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Redirection (computing), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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A key part of Xinet history has been the company’s expertise in Unix operating systems. AT&T first distributed their Unix source-code to university researchers at Carnegie Melon and U.C. Berkeley. U.C. Berkeley researchers popularized their own version of Unix, which became known as “Berkeley Unix.” In 1979, when AT&T announced its intention to commercialize Unix, it prompted the researchers at U.C. Berkeley to form a cooperative set called MT Xinu which set out to package Berkeley Unix as a commercial operating system and to handle support for it among its users. In 1983, MT Xinu was among the first companies to release a commercial version of Unix called BSD Unix 4.2.

Throughout 1987–1989, MT Xinu released the first Unix-to-Mac connectivity software and the first AppleTalk print spoolers (K-spool). Xinet AppleTalk server file-sharing products, K-AShare, and K-FS joined K-Spool in 1990. Over time, MT Xinu had become more and more of a consulting company, since all the hardware vendors had begun to produce and promote their own versions of Unix. Xinet first emerged as the division of MT Xinu, which was responsible for developing and supporting a server for Unix that would connect with Mac clients. In 1989, some of MT Xinu’s employees, including current Xinet CEO, Scott Seebass, decided to form a separate company.

Incorporated in 1991, Xinet retained all of MT Xinu’s key software engineers as well as all the source-code rights to continue making the “K-products.” Xinet determined that its expertise in Unix/Mac connectivity would make a big difference in improving prepress performance, so in 1995, Xinet released FullPress, the foundation for WebNative Suite.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Xinet, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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HeliOS was a Unix-like operating system for parallel computers developed and sold by Perihelion Software. It was most commonly used on various Transputer systems, but also supported other architectures. The system provided a micro-kernel that implemented a distributed name space and messaging protocol, through which services were accessed. A POSIX compatibility library enabled the use of Unix application software, and the system provided most of the usual Unix utilities.

Work on Helios began in the autumn of 1986. Its success was limited by the commercial failure of the Transputer, and efforts to move to other architectures met with limited success. Perihelion ceased trading in 1998.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article HeliOS, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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By the early 1990s, the major Unix players had begun to realize that the standards rivalries known as the Unix wars were causing all participants more harm than good, leaving Unix open to emerging competition from Microsoft. The COSE initiative in 1993 can be considered to be the first unification step and the merger of the Open Software Foundation (OSF) and X/Open in 1996 as the ultimate step in the end of those skirmishes. OSF had previously merged with UNIX International in 1994, meaning that the new entity effectively represented all elements of the Unix community of the time.

In January 1997, the responsibility for the X Window System was transferred to the Open Group from the defunct X Consortium. In 1999, X.Org was formed to supervise releases, but development largely happened elsewhere. In 2004, the Open Group passed control of the x.org domain name, and effective stewardship of the X Window System to the newly formed X.Org Foundation. (See the history of the X Window System).

The value of the UNIX brand has diminished due to changes in the open systems marketplace, notably the widespread acceptance of “non-standardized” Unix-like operating systems such as Linux. More recently there has been an effort by The Open Group in conjunction with the Linux Foundation to help standardize Linux via the Linux Standard Base specification, but the success of this initiative appears to be very limited .

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Open Group, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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The first HZ decoder was written in 1989 by the code’s inventor for the Unix operating system.

The hztty program, also for the Unix operating system, was also among the first and one of the most popular HZ decoders. It deviates from the specification in that it will display the escape sequences (i.e., “~{” and “~}”), and it does not treat “~~” and “~” followed by a newline specially. This was probably to allow software which assumes one character to occupy one screen position (on a text screen) to function correctly without modification.

Support on Microsoft Windows came later, and a number of third-party “Chinese systems” support HZ. These systems may provide an option to hide the escape sequences.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article HZ (character encoding), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Ken Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles, is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with the B programming language and his shepherding of the Unix and Plan 9 operating systems. Most recently Thompson is also the co-creator of Google’s programming language Go.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Ken Thompson, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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The pipeline concept and the vertical-bar notation was invented by Douglas McIlroy, one of the authors of the early command shells, after he noticed that much of the time they were processing the output of one program as the input to another. His ideas were implemented in 1973 when Ken Thompson added pipes to the UNIX operating system. The idea was eventually ported to other operating systems, such as DOS, OS/2, Microsoft Windows, and BeOS, often with the same notation.

Although developed independently, Unix pipes are similar to, and were preceded by the ‘communication files’ developed by Ken Lochner in the 1960′s for the Dartmouth Time Sharing System.

The robot in the icon for Apple’s Automator, which also uses a pipeline concept to chain repetitive commands together, holds a pipe in homage to the original Unix concept.

Other operating systems

This feature of Unix was borrowed by other operating systems, such as Taos and MS-DOS, and eventually became the pipes and filters design pattern of software engineering.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Pipeline (Unix), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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sed (”stream editor”) is a Unix utility that (a) parses text files and (b) implements a programming language which can apply textual transformations to such files. It reads input files line by line (sequentially), applying the operation which has been specified via the command line (or a ”sed script”), and then outputs the line. It was developed from 1973 to 1974 as a Unix utility by Lee E. McMahon of Bell Labs, and is available today for most operating systems.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Sed, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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