24 Maintenance and Environment
Over the years, UNIX has served as the underlying operating system for a wide range of hardware platforms. Once upon a time, dozens of programmers shared a single system, such as the now-famous VAX. In that era, a tremendous amount of effort went into maintaining equipment and providing a nurturing environment for it. Seasoned UNIX system administrators often knew as much about ethylene glycol cooling systems as they did about UNIX account management.
The 90s brought an influx of desktop workstations and a move away from “big iron” computing platforms. For a while, it appeared that the days of the central machine ...
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