Historical background of windows and unix operating systems

Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by

Microsoft. Microsoft introduced this operating environment on November 20, 1985, as a
graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical
user interfaces (GUIs).

UNIX

Unix  (officially trademarked as  UNIX) is a  multitasking,  multi-user computer operating system
originally developed in 1969 by a group of  AT&T employees at Bell Labs. 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.

Compare and contrast Windows VS Unix Operating systems

Unix
 Command-line interface (CLI) operating system. Must run commands from the terminal
to interact with the operating system.
 Built on an open standard(It is an open source code.), but the Single UNIX Specification
provides a standard and ensures continuity across different distributions of Unix.
 Unix offers fine control and flexibility.
 Has greater built-in security and stability.
 Updates must be installed manually.
 Portable and consistent.
 Requires significant learning curve.

Windows
Graphical user interface (GUI) operating system. Designed for use with a mouse,
trackpad, or touch screen. Is User friendly.
The code is proprietary (It is not an open source code), owned by Microsoft , also it is
Compatible with thousands of applications and utilities.
Windows offers a Command Prompt window for fine control and flexibility.
Troubleshooting problems can be tricky.
Updates and fixes can be downloaded and installed automatically.
Has Familiar interface and easy to use
UNIX File systems

Unix file system is a logical method of organizing and storing large amounts of information in a
way that makes it easy to manage. A file is a smallest unit in which the information is stored.
Unix file system has several important features. All data in Unix is organized into files. All files
are organized into directories. These directories are organized into a tree-like structure called
the file system.

Files in Unix System are organized into multi-level hierarchy structure known as a directory
tree. At the very top of the file system is a directory called “root” which is represented by a “/”.
All other files are “descendants” of root.

The Unix Filesystem usually has below directories present in the file system.

 bin: It is a short form for binary files. This directory stores the commonly used
executable commands.
 mnt: This contains information regarding the mounted devices.
 root: This is the root user’s home directory.
 tmp: This is a storage for temporary files. As they are temporary they are removed
periodically from the filesystem.
 usr: It contains a set of executable commands
 home: It has a collection of directories and files.
 proc: It contains files that are related to system processes.

The Unix File System consists of different types of files

 Ordinary files : these files are used to store information of the users. It may be some
text or any image which is stored. It is normally located under a directory and does not
contain any other files.
 Directories : Directories store both special and ordinary files or even other directories.
All these directories are the descendants of the root directory.
 Special Files : Used to represent a real physical device such as a printer, tape drive or a
terminal, used for Input/Output (I/O) operations.
 Pipes :UNIX allows you to link commands together using a pipe. The pipe acts a
temporary file which only exists to hold data from one command until it is read by
another.A Unix pipe provides a one-way flow of data.
 Sockets :A Unix socket (or Inter-process communication socket) is a special file which
allows for advanced inter-process communication. A Unix Socket is used in a client-
server application framework.
 Symbolic Link: Symbolic link is used for referencing some other file of the file system.
Symbolic link is also known as Soft link. It contains a text form of the path to the file it
references.
Linux File systems
A Linux file system is a structured collection of files on a disk drive or a partition. Linux file
system is generally a built-in layer of a Linux operating system used to handle the data
management of the storage. It helps to arrange the file on the disk storage. It manages the file
name, file size, creation date, and much more information about a file.

Linux file system has a hierarchal file structure as it contains a root directory and its
subdirectories. All other directories can be accessed from the root directory. A partition usually
has only one file system, but it may have more than one file system.

Some of the usual directories present in the Linux file system are as follows

 bin: Where Linux core commands reside like ls, mv.

 boot: Where boot loader and boot files are located.
 dev: Where all physical drives are mounted like USBs DVDs.
 home: Where every user will have a personal folder to put his folders with his name.
 etc: Contains configurations for the installed packages.
 lib: Where the libraries of the installed packages located since libraries shared among all
packages.
Linux offers many file systems such as Ext, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, btrfs, and swap.

 Ext, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4 file systems: Ext stands for Extended File System. The Ext file
system is an older version, and is no longer used due to some limitations. Ext2 is the
first Linux file system that allows managing two terabytes of data. Ext3 is developed
through Ext2; it is an upgraded version of Ext2 and contains backward compatibility.
Ext4 file system is the faster file system among all the Ext file systems.

 JFS: FS stands for Journaled File System. It is an alternative to the Ext file system, It is a
handy file system when CPU power is limited.

 ReiserFS: ReiserFS is an alternative to the Ext3 file system. It has improved performance
and advanced features.
 XFS: XFS file system was considered as high-speed JFS, which is developed for parallel
I/O processing.
 Btrfs: Btrfs stands for the B tree file system. It is used for fault tolerance, repair system,
fun administration, extensive storage configuration, and more.
 Swap: The swap file system is used for memory paging in Linux operating system during
the system hibernation.