After three decades of use, the UNIX computer operating system from Bell Labs is still regarded as one of the most powerful, versatile, and flexible operating systems (OS) in the computer world. Its popularity is due to many factors, including its ability to run a wide variety of machines, from micros to supercomputers, and its portability -- all of which led to its adoption by many manufacturers.

The UNIX operating system was designed to let a number of programmers access the computer at the same time and share its resources. While initially meant for medium-sized computers, the system was soon moved to

BeOS is the operating system from Be, Inc. “Based on an entirely new idea in computing, BeOS was designed to satisfy the higher processing and memory requirements of today's digital media on standard PC hardware, without slowing down or freezing up.” say the developers. It works with audio, video, image, and Internet-based applications, and edits files of millions of gigabytes in size, simultaneously, in real-time and boots up in less than 20 seconds. A very innovative feature that BeOS brings is the fact that each application runs in its own protected memory space, so if one crashes, the system and other applications don't even notice; all you need to do is reload the crashed application. That could also be time-saving when you need to make a configuration change. Be Inc. also offers BeIA, a version of the BeOS intended specifically for internet appliances. Unfortunately, this OS isn’t all that popular.

Also called Darwin, the core OS, is the part that was built using open standards. At the core of Darwin is a key component called the kernel, the component that mediates most of the interaction between the operating system and the hardware; Mac OS X features the Mach 3.0 kernel, originally developed at Carnegie-Mellon University. Among others, the Darwin also features a super-efficient virtual memory manager, a memory protection architecture that allocates a unique address space for each application or process running on your Mac and advanced device support.

BSD/OS is a fast, scalable, multitasking, 32-bit server network platform with a small footprint, virtual memory (optional) and memory protection, with support for 768 Mbytes of RAM and up to 3.75 Gbytes of user virtual memory; it can perform on systems equipped with as little as 2 Mbytes of RAM. The new platform offers an Internet Server System using Intel, Sparc, and Alpha processors, Internet Appliance Platforms, RAID solutions, Multi-boot Workstations, and LAN/WAN products. The BSD/OS kernel is derived from the UC Berkeley’s 4.4BSD release with a few other enhancements.

Some topics in this essay:
Bell Labs, PC World, Mac OS, QuickTime Internet, Shell Shell, MacOS Apple, Interface GUI, Windows Competitors, QuickTime OpenGL, IBM OS/2, operating system, mac os, operating systems, unix system, virtual memory, built operating system, windows 95, versions unix, sun microsystems, mbytes ram, word processing,