What is Unix?

Unix is a family of operating systems - sets of programs that manage the use of computer hardware resources by software applications. It thereby allows multiple users to access a computer simultaneously, perform parallelized computations, exchange data and share hardware resources. This diagram shows an oversimplified view of an operating system - the kernel (in blue) is a core program that is always active and controls interactions between the hardware (in green), and software (in red).

Technically, our servers use a version of Linux, a Unix-like operating system. Furthermore, even major operating systems such as Android and MacOS are Unix-based underneath.