UNIX: The Operating System Running (Virtually) Everything
Sunday, February 14, 2016 at 12:58AM 
Yep. You heard me right. Unix, not Windows powers today’s servers, portable devices and more desktops than ever.
“But, MacTexan, what about all those bizillions of Windows computers? Like everybody has one of those, right?”
Well, yes, but slowly but surely those desktops are becoming more and more irrelevant. Read the title again please. It speaks about the OS that’s running everything, not the OS used to access everything.
“But, but, MacTexan, if UNIX is running everything, why haven’t I heard about it?”
You hear about it every day, but it is rarely referred to by the name “UNIX”. You know it by the names OS X, iOS, Android, Ubuntu, Chrome OS and a host of others. Yes, all these operating systems are based on some variant of UNIX. By way of (very oversimplified) explanation, all these OSs start with a UNIX kernel and add a GUI (Graphical User Interface) on top. These GUIs are what we’ve come to recognize as the various, above-mentioned operating systems.
Add to all these the hundreds of thousands of anonymous servers that power companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and EBAY, to name a few. Virtually every one run some flavor of Linux (a UNIX variant developed by Linus Torvalds released in 1991) running a software stack called LAMP. LAMP is an acronym for Linux, Apache web server, MySQL database and Perl or PHP development platform.
“Why do so many companies run LAMP servers, MacTexan?”
