Rediscovering UNIX Reliability in Linux

Rumors of the demise of the venerable UNIX operating system, however, have been greatly exaggerated. In the last 18 months, UNIX-type systems have enjoyed a renaissance as the platform of choice for mission-critical and business-critical applications, as well as desktop and dedicated applications. Much of the resurgence of UNIX arises from the adoption of Linux and the success of the open source movement. A number of important technical factors conspire to make UNIX-type systems attractive to today's systems designers: reliability and fault-avoidance afforded by UNIX process-based memory protection; a modular, hierarchical application model; open "tinker toy" application building blocks; numerous options for distributed computing and high availability; standard networking built upon Internet Protocol; and broadly ported OS and application code targeting off-the-shelf CPU architectures.