Can i run unix on a pc

Improve this answer. Kyle Jones Kyle Jones 6, 2 2 gold badges 20 20 silver badges 31 31 bronze badges. It even says so on the case! Do you own this? I think it does run, but he has to manually translate the high-low voltages into bits using a yellow multimeter. I want a three button mouse like that one. Also, is that a list of positive numbers on the wall? You know, that's not the most appropriate thing to be learning by rote Show 7 more comments.

Any answer to a question as vague as 'name three PC operating systems' can be shot down. Marcks Thomas Marcks Thomas 6, 2 2 gold badges 20 20 silver badges 37 37 bronze badges. Your answer appeared after I submitted mine, but you make some interesting points that mesh with mine, so I upvoted your answer as a good one, too.

Add a comment. I have two explanations for this: The task was supposed to name three PC-only operating systems Strictly put, Unix is not exactly an operation system - it's a family of operation systems, derived from the first one developed in , and is not a PC operating System.

For point number 2, unix. Operating System An operating system OS is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software.

Unix Unix officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system [ Amos M. Carpenter Amos M. Carpenter 1, 2 2 gold badges 14 14 silver badges 22 22 bronze badges. If I'd try to prove anything to any of my professors using a wikipedia article, they'd kick me out of the course. WalterMaier-Murdnelch: Hence the disclaimer. However, you can always at least use the sources quoted in Wikipedia to make your point.

And if any prof or teacher won't accept that , they need to be told that it's about time to step into the 21st century. The Internet may be full of useless stuff, but if you know where and how to look, there are many great and authoritative sources as well.

And Wikipedia does try to hold itself to high standards, give them some credit. Marty Fried Marty Fried 4 4 silver badges 9 9 bronze badges. My coworker is currently running a stock release of Windows on a Sun box that shipped with Solaris installed. The only quirks have been related to locating compatible device drivers for a couple of the server-grade peripherals made from obscure chip sets.

But even those quirks were resolved by drivers made available by Sun themselves. Windows was a supported configuration of the box. Oh, I meant "operating systems that exclusively have run on PC hardware". Kaz Kaz 2, 1 1 gold badge 15 15 silver badges 21 21 bronze badges. Wyzard Wyzard 6, 2 2 gold badges 26 26 silver badges 30 30 bronze badges.

Macs are not PCs. Even Apple says that. They're not mainframes, they're not servers at least not the ones we're talking about , they're not embedded systems though iPhones are.

When you buy a Mac you take it home and put it on your desk. It's a computer for your personal use. That was more of a tongue-in-cheek comment. Of course they're personal computers. But clearly, Apple doesn't want to sell "PCs". I actually detest Apple with their "we're not a PC" high horse — rickyduck. If Apple started claiming to make PCs then they'll just get unhappy customers who can't run the software labeled as "PC".

Show 1 more comment. Many versions of Linux don't run on PCs. Bill K Bill K 1 1 silver badge 7 7 bronze badges. I posted a message on a board asking if unix and linux could run on one pc.

I was told unix cannot run on a pc. Then i was told unix variations can run on a pc but the orignial unix,.. Now i've seen 's run unix, my friend has a altos.. Thank you so much for your time and i look forward to your reply. Join Date: Sep I don't recall the original UNIX running on bit architecture. Which UNIX was that? Find all posts by Neo. I asked if i could run linux and unix together, and this person tells me you cant run unix on a computer cause its 64 bit, then he tells me you can run variations.

Well is their that much difference in variations? I just wanted to learn the program with linux, so i dont have to have two computers. Join Date: Jul Unix as an operating system does not exist. As Neo states so well, it's an architectural design - a style.

And yes, you can run different 'types' of Unix on the same machine. Also, the "original" UNIX was slow, cumbersome you had to reboot the system before you could use a newly created directory , and underdeveloped. That was in Originally all operating systems were created using a very primitive programming language called assembly whose instructions corresponded directly to the operations carried out by the hardware.

This was difficult to write, cumbersome and prone to errors. Assembly was also used in the original version of UNIX created in however, in it was completely rewritten using the newly invented C programming language which is still used today.

This turned out to be a landmark event in computing as it meant that the same operating system could be run on different computer hardware without it having to be rewritten from scratch each time. In this way, the operating system could essentially outlive its original hardware thus guaranteeing its long term existence.

Since these did not evolve from a common software base, differences between each vendor's version of UNIX soon started to appear. This led in the late s and early s to major squables over whose version of UNIX should be adopted as the standard one and even to the present day this has still not been fully resolved.

At around the same time, two developments occured which also had a major influence on the development and use of Linux. Until then, computer vendors each adopted their own proprietary networking standards meaning that, for example, an IBM computer could only "talk" to another IBM computer. This lead to an explosion in network connectivity with smaller computer networks becoming part of larger national networks which in turn were part of still larger international ones. These networks of networks were soon to form the backbone of the global Internet which we know today.

The second development came about through work on human-computer intefaces carried out by Xerox at their Palo Alto Research Centre in the early s. Previously, the most efficient way of using a computer was to type in a series of slightly cryptic looking commands and wait for the computer to respond - possibly with something equally as cryptic if this sounds bad, the previous method was to punch holes in pieces of card for the computer to read!

Obviously something more user-friendly was needed if computing was ever to break into the mainstream and Xerox hit up on the, then novel, idea of the user being a able to interact with the computer by moving a device later called a mouse to point at icons on a graphical display.

This was a revolutionary idea but unfortunately ahead of its time. Few computer installations had terminals that supported graphical displays, almost none had a mouse interface and in any case there was insufficient processing power to support such a complex operating system interface. The so-called WIMP windows, icons, mice and pointers interface may have languished as a research curiosity had it not been for work carried out at MIT in In contrast to the "dumb" terminals used in mainframe installations these workstations had significant computing power and the ability to display complicated graphics.

MIT realised that the complex "number crunching" required in many scientific applications could be done on a powerful central system and results displayed locally on a workstation. The whole thing could be tied together by a graphical operating system interface similar to that developed by Xerox. X Windows was a conservative standard which did not specify how the graphics windows and icons etc themselves were displayed or how people would use them.

This allowed vendors free rein to develop their own window managers. This lack of co-operation between vendors hampered the development of a truely sophisticated graphical interface for UNIX and to this day it is fair to say that the UNIX and Linux graphical environments lag a long way behind their Microsoft and Apple counterparts in terms of usability.

This was not the first personal computer designed to be used by a single user which would sit comfortably on an office desk but it quickly became the most popular with many other manufacturers making IBM PC clones thanks to IBM's open licensing policy. Initial machines where extremely expensive by modern standards but improving technology and economies of scale quickly brought down prices to a point where they were affordable by non-business users including university researchers.

This was very primitive compared to UNIX but pretty much all that the original hardware could support. Rapid increases in microprocessor power and the development of special graphics processors though allowed Microsoft to produce a graphical operating system interface for the PC which was launched as Windows 1. This was fairly "clunky" and unreliable by modern standards but advances in software and hardware eventually led to a sophisticated operating system which was fairly easy and intuitive to use.

Soon the graphics capabilities of PCs matched those of the original UNIX workstations and the development of special software such as eXceed allowed users to login to central UNIX machines, interact with them using X Windows and display graphical results locally on the PC.

Since a PC was generally a fraction of the cost of a UNIX workstation and could perform other tasks such a word processing, users quite reasonably started to wonder about the logic of buying a UNIX workstation.