UNIX

Unix-sama
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Character Information
Common Names	Unix-sama
Other Names	Bell Labs Unix (sometimes spelt in all capitals, UNIX)-sama
Appearance
Design
Creator	C-Chan
First Appearance	Preconcept, February 2007; finished, September 2007
Technical Information
System Personified	(Bell Labs) Unix
Developer(s)	Bell Labs, ATT
Debut	Summer 1969
Latest release	Unknown (mid-1970s?)

Technical details

Unix is an OS originally developed in 1969 by ATT employees at Bell Labs, notably Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. It was originally developed to run on the PDP-7, a small minicomputer considered no more than a glorified graphics display by many. Because of its sparse development conditions, Unix became a radical departure from the OS designs of the day; intentionally built to be small, simple, flexible and highly portable. From there it was ported to the PDP-11, and in 1973 was rewritten entirely in C. Unix quickly caught on as an academic OS. ATT had been forbidden to enter the computer industry by an anti-trust lawsuit, and thus sell Unix as a product; but this didn’t stop its creators from sending out tapes running Unix, and source code, to those who asked.

Bell Labs’ Unix went on to have many releases as a research and academic OS, with V7 being considered the “last true (research) Unix”. Its direct descendants include BSD, System V, and Plan 9, to name a few of the most known ones; these OSes went on to inspire all Unixes we see today, like Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and even Mac OS X. It also inspired the creation of countless more Unix-like OSes, systems that--while not related in code--work as a Unix would.

The history behind Unix, especially its connection to Multics, is an inextricable and long story; but it is accepted that the creators of Unix saw that complexity and budget problems nearly killed Multics on several occasions, and wished to avoid this fate with Unix. Indeed, Unix does carry some traits from Multics; but is the opposite in design and philosophy.

Character details

While very old in years, Unix-sama is physically depicted as a young teenage girl of around five feet tall, a reference to Unix’s small, simplistic design. Her hair is long and dark purple; her piercing eyes are blue, with the Bell Labs logo implanted in them, and wears glasses. She has horned owl ears, owls symbolically carrying connotations of wisdom, truth, and darkness (as well as traditionally holding associations with goddesses and magical powers). She often dresses in plain, professional clothing, referencing Unix’s no-frills appearance and design, boots, and wields a polished aluminum staff inscribed with roman numerals, each said to stand for a tenet of the Unix Philosophy. Since the 1990s, she has been all but confined to a wheelchair, due to emotional--and some physical-- trauma which occurred the Unix Wars.

Unix-sama is very intelligent and a skilled mind-gamer; capable of manipulating and defeating enemies without the use of physical force. While she was born without any knowledge of sorcery, in her youth she gained some powers; fire control being one of her most used ones.

See also:

• Wikipedia article on Unix
• Wikipedia article on the Unix philosophy