Unix Overview

   With the explosion of Internet use, the Unix Operating system has
   become a phrase familiar to even the casual Internet user. Powerful
   computers with large graphic displays, called workstations, have
   become indispensable to the scientific and engineering communities,
   and typically, they run some version of Unix. Even if you're just
   'surfing the net' from your PC or Mac at home, you will encounter some
   variations of Unix.

   At FIU, there are over fifty computers running Unix. Most of them run
   a variant of the Berkeley 4 release, while the rest run AT&T's System
   V. A large number of the machines are used by the school of Computer
   Science and the College of Engineering, the rest by the departments 
   of Physics, Chemistry and University Computer Services. These machines
   are all linked by a high speed network which allows resources to be
   distributed throughout the campus. The Unix computers, as well as our
   VAX systems, use a common communication protocol called TCP/IP that
   permits the transfer of information among them. The University is also
   connected to the Internet, which includes almost every research
   institution and many companies in the United States in addition to
   many other countries.

   Unix is a multiuser, multitasking operating system, which means that
   it can support many people on each machine performing unrelated tasks
   at one time, much like Digital's VMS operating system, and unlike the
   widespread MS-DOS which runs on Intel- based personal computers. If
   you are familiar with one of these other operating systems, you should
   have little trouble learning Unix, since most of the concepts found in
   these other systems are also part of it. All three share the notion of
   hierarchical directories, command interpreters, file protections, and
   environments. However, you will see that Unix encourages, sometimes to
   the extreme, the idea of putting the many small utilities of the
   operating system to work together for you, accomplishing complicated
   tasks which would require you to write programs in most other
   operating systems.