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Lesson 2 Course project
Objective Understand the course project.

Advanced Unix Course Project

The project is designed to let you apply the skills learned during the course. In UNIX Fundamentals II, the course project continues what you did in UNIX Fundamentals I.
That is, you will apply additional skills to continue working on an intranet Web site.
The course provides several files in varying states of completion. Throughout the course, you'll work with these files as you:
  1. Learn additional techniques for managing files
  2. Customize your UNIX environment, making it easier to work with the command line
  3. Perform advanced editing in vi
  4. Archive the files and store them on an FTP site

History of Unix

In the last three decades, due to commercial purposes and activities, there are no other operating systems like UNIX, which is open for the academic community to learn and conduct research. In addition, there are plenty of references about UNIX that have been published, but most of them were originally published around 1980s. For the recent promising programmers, the published classics may be somewhat obscure because of the sparse context that might not be necessary for readers in those days but can be unfamiliar to nowadays readers. As the well-known rapid development of computer hardware in the latest decades, computer architecture and structure have made a big change. This change has also wielded a deep influence on the theories and concepts of computer, which makes the difficulty for recent readers to understand well descriptions and expressions in the published UNIX classics, and to map them properly into practical cases. It is possible to build an obstacle for readers to learn from them. Otherwise, for the operating system construction, which belongs to software developments, it would be a pity and defect if losing an operational means. Fortunately, this means can be gained by doing research on UNIX.
It is taken that UNIX has its own philosophy and several items in the philosophy are written in different references.
  1. UNIX is also deemed to be an operating system of the programmer.
  2. UNIX programmers have done a wonderful work just as for tackling a necessary affair, from which others else really benefit. It is critical for the academic community.
  3. If AT&T could market computer products without a 1956 Consent Decree signed with the Federal Government, and if Bell Laboratories did not withdraw Ken Thompson and others from the MULTICS project, and if Professor Robert S. Fabry of the University of California at Berkeley did not contact Ken Thompson at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Purdue University in November 1973, we would have a totally different story about UNIX.
It needs the open and free soil to breed an academic activity. The more relieved the outside environment is, the more natural the academic activity develops within the environment. UNIX was destined for being flourishing in its day. Even though being just observers on this period of history, the authors of this book are impressed by the passion and concentration that UNIX developers had in the day. During five years of teaching UNIX in their campuses, the authors realized that if this fantastic piece of history was not introduced to more readers, it would be a pity for authors as well as readers. In this high technology and high material civilization (smart phones and smart devices) age, UNIX development process can give readers some new inspiration.