Hacking in the Movies

I'm not a hacker, but I play one on TV.

November 24, 2009 at 4:28pm
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It’s a Unix System. I know this.

Jurassic Park, 1993

Learn more about UNIX systems at Wikipedia.

Today the term Unix is used to describe any operating system that conforms to Unix standards, meaning the core operating system operates the same as the original Unix operating system.

Unix was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user in a time-sharing configuration. Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text for storing data; a hierarchical file system; treating devices and certain types of inter-process communication (IPC) as files; and the use of a large number of software tools, small programs that can be strung together through a command line interpreter using pipes, as opposed to using a single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These concepts are known as the Unix philosophy.

Under Unix, the “operating system” consists of many of these utilities along with the master control program, the kernel. The kernel provides services to start and stop programs, handles the file system and other common “low level” tasks that most programs share, and, perhaps most importantly, schedules access to hardware to avoid conflicts if two programs try to access the same resource or device simultaneously.

Notes

  1. hackinginthemovies posted this