Most of these answers are far too late to the game, as the *
usage was used on Usenet and elsewhere to refer to the multiplicity of Unixoid systems. This was significantly before "the suits" even knew what was happening in cyberspace and didn't understand it if they did.
I found a reference in the comp.risks archive dated May 1987 where the title
Concerning UN*X (in)security
was already so pedestrian as to warrant no explanation. By this time Xenix had been long on the market as were various "*ix" based variants which were decidedly "unix" but not "Unix".
This is a highly simplified history of Unix and its derivatives. Windows does not figure in it because its history is essentially separate.
Once upon a time operating systems were complex and unwieldy. One day in the late 1960s, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and a few of their colleagues at AT&T Bell Labs decided to write a simpler version of Multics to run games on their PDP-7, and thus Unix was born.
AT&T held the rights to the code, and licenses were expensive. Many other companies sublicensed Unix and sold their own version. Major players included DEC, HP, IBM, Sun. Unix variants added their own extensions, often nicking ideas from each other and from academia.
Meanwhile, in Berkeley, a number of academics were unhappy with the licensing situation and decided to create a version of Unix that didn't include any AT&T-licensed code. Thus in the early 1980s the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, became a free variant of Unix. BSD first ran on Minicomputers such as PDP-11 and VAXen.
Meanwhile, on the East coast, Richard Stallman threw a fit when he couldn't get the source code to his printer driver. He founded the GNU (GNU's not Unix) project in 1983 intending to make a free Unix-like operating system, only better. After a little hesitation, the kernel of this operating system was chosen to be Hurd, which is going to be usable any decade now. Many components of the GNU project are included in all current free unices, in particular the compiler GCC.
Meanwhile, in Finland, Linus Torvalds went on a hacking binge in summer 1991. When he woke up, he realized that he'd written an operating system for his PC, and he decided to share it by putting it on an FTP server in a directory called linux. The success exceeded his expectations.
Many people created software distributions including the Linux kernel, many GNU programs, the X Window System, and other free software. These distributions (Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc.) are what people generally refer to when they say “Linux”. Most Linux distributions consist mostly of free-as-in-speech software, though software that is merely free-as-in-beer is often included when no free equivalent exists.
Other currently existing unices include the various forks of BSD (you get a choice of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, all being free, open and developed through the 'net), as well as a disminishing number of commercial variants targeted towards servers: and AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and a few very minor contenders. Another proprietary unix-based operating system is Mac OS X running on Apple desktops, laptops and PDAs.
Best Answer
Even before they were routinely interconnected, Unix systems could be considered as effectively their own BBSes. They were usually multi-user systems, and they allowed their users to swap files, and exchange messages (initially as a specific use of shared files). Users didn’t have to connect to a separate BBS.
Interconnecting Unix systems, whether permanently or intermittently (using UUCP), provided an extension to this, and protocols were created to allow users to share files with users on other systems, and to send and receive messages to and from users on other systems. Successive changes to protocols and new protocols provided more and more indirection, for example going from bang paths for email to the present-day DNS-based system.
There was one significant difference between BBSes as seen from micros, and Unix systems: the former tended to favour asynchronous use, since only a small number of users could be connected simultaneously (compared to the overall number of users), whereas the latter also allowed synchronous messaging systems (starting with
write
which was already present in V1 Unix) and related programs. This led in particular to the emergence of MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and the communities surrounding them; these were nominally multi-user text-based games, but often users were interested more in chatting with other users than actually playing the game. (MUDs weren’t only available on Unix systems; Micronet in particular in the UK offered one which was accessible over Prestel.)Many Unix systems also provided dial-up access; this was fairly straightforward since modems could be considered as extensions of the serial lines used to connect terminals to Unix systems. I don’t know of any which had the same access patterns as BBSes; most would have provided dial-up access for regular users working from home (although logins could of course be shared, or given out more widely than the bean-counters intended), and some provided commercial access to specific services.
Many early ISPs effectively provided dial-up connectivity to Unix systems; but the latter weren’t the end-users’ target, they were simply a hop on the way to the rest of the Internet, either directly (for interactive protocols) or indirectly (for email, Usenet etc.).