UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation

Why Is UNIX So Successful?

Although the large number of different versions of UNIX can be considered a weakness since it raised the possibility of incompatibilities, it also demonstrates one of the great strengths of UNIX: the ease by which UNIX has been ported to a wide number of different hardware architectures and platforms, a task that was addressed very early on during development at Bell Labs.

Even though the number of versions of UNIX increased dramatically over the years, porting applications between one version and the next was still considerably easier than porting between one proprietary OS and the next. This task has been made easier by the introduction of relevant standards that nearly all of the major UNIX vendors have adopted. No other operating system can claim this level of dominance across such a wide range of platforms. The proliferation of UNIX resulted in a huge amount of development pushing UNIX way ahead of its nearest proprietary competitors.