Unix

Also known as UNIX, though it doesn't really stand for anything. The Unix operating system was first created in Bell Labs way back in the 1960s. It became popular in the 1970s for general purpose computing, but not on the consumer level. Since a lot of Internet hosting is done on Unix machines, the platform gained tremendous popularity in the 1990s. It still remains somewhat of an ambiguous operating system, as there are many different versions of it. These include Ultrix, Xenix, Linux, and GNU, which, making things even more confusing, all run on a number of different hardware platforms. Most people don't need to mess with Unix, but computer geeks seem to have the need to use it as much as possible.