General Characteristics of UNIX as an Operating System (OS)

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Large Number of Applications – there are an enormous amount of applications available for UNIX operating systems. They range from commercial applications such as CAD, Maya, WordPerfect, to many free applications.
Free Applications and Even a Free Operating System - of all of the applications available under UNIX, many of them are free. The compilers and interpreters that we use in most of the programming courses here at UMBC can be downloaded free of charge. Most of the development that we do in programming courses is done under the Linux OS.

Less Resource Intensive - in general, most UNIX installations tend to be much less demanding on system resources. In many cases, the old family computer that can barely run Windows is more than sufficient to run the latest version of Linux.
Internet Development - Much of the backbone of the Internet is run by UNIX servers. Many of the more general web servers run UNIX with the Apache web server - another free application

Flavors of UNIX

AIX - developed by IBM for use on its mainframe computers
BSD/OS - developed by Wind River for Intel processors
HP-UX - developed by Hewlett-Packard for its HP 9000 series of business servers
IRIX - developed by SGI for applications that use 3-D visualization and virtual reality
QNX - a real time operating system developed by QNX Software Systems

Solaris - developed by Sun Microsystems for the SPARC platform and the most widely used proprietary flavor for web servers
Tru64 - developed by Compaq for the Alpha processor

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)

When you logon locally, you are presented with graphical environment.
You start at a graphical login screen. You must enter your username and password. You also the have the option to choose from a couple session types. Mainly you have the choice between Gnome and KDE.
Once you enter in your username and password, you are then presented with a graphical environment that looks like one of the following...

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