!!! Overview
[{$pagename}] (trademarked as [UNIX]) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer [Operating System] that derive from the original [AT&T] [Unix], developed starting in the [1970s] at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed [{$pagename}] to outside parties from the late [1970s], leading to a variety of both academic and commercial variants of [{$pagename}] from vendors such as the University of California, Berkeley ([BSD]), Microsoft ([Xenix]), IBM ([AIX]) and [Sun Microsystems] ([Solaris]). [AT&T] finally sold its rights in [{$pagename}] to [Novell INC] in the early [1990s], which then sold its Unix business to the [Santa Cruz Operation] ([SCO]) in [1995|Year 1995], but the [UNIX] trademark passed to the industry standards consortium [The Open Group], which allows the use of the mark for certified operating systems compliant with the Single [UNIX] Specification (SUS). Among these is Apple's [macOS],[5] which is the [{$pagename}] version with the largest installed base as of 2014.

From the power user's or programmer's perspective, Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the "Unix philosophy", meaning that the operating system provides a set of simple tools that each perform a limited, well-defined function,[6] with a unified [File System] as the main means of communication and a shell scripting and command language to combine the tools to perform complex workflows. Aside from the modular design, Unix also distinguishes itself from its predecessors as the first portable [Operating System]: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language that allowed Unix to reach numerous platforms.

Many Unix-like operating systems have arisen over the years, of which [Linux] is the most popular, having displaced SUS-certified Unix on many server platforms since its inception in the early 1990s.

!! More Information
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* [#1] - [Unix|Wikipedia:Unix|target='_blank'] - based on information obtained 2017-02-20-