Operating System Comparison
Elvira Bill, Jennifer Coners, Amber Nightingale-Watson,
Chris Sitter, and Michael Sullivan
POS355
October 28, 2013
Ashok Rao

Operating System Comparison
This paper will provide a comparison of the following operating systems; UNIX, LINUX, MAC, and Microsoft Windows. Each section will provide details for each of the operating systems. The areas that will be reviewed include, History, Memory Management, Process Management, File management, Security, User Interface, Server Performance, Clustering, and Load Balancing. Before getting into the details of each system, brief history of each system will be provided.
Platform History
This section will provide a general history of the platforms being compared. The first of them being the platform with the longest history, UNIX.
UNIX
UNIX operating system has the longest history of the systems that will be compared in this paper. UNIX started as an operating system in 1969 when Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others started working on the "little-used PDP-7 in a corner" at Bell Labs and what was to become UNIX. Over the past 44 years UNIX has changed from an operating system written in assembler to an open system. As an open system, others would develop their own variations of UNIX. This caused issues as all the variations had compatibility issues with each other. Then in 1995 a single specification for UNIX was released. The many version of UNIX now need to comply with the published specification.
Linux
In 1991 Linus Torvalds collected the feedback of a UNIX system called Minix. Reviewing what users did not like, he decided to develop his own variant of the UNIX operating system from scratch. Linus decided it would be a free operating system and rely on the Linux community to help develop the operating system . This has become a very successful project and now there are many variations of Linux branded under different names.
Mac
Mac is the marketing name for Macintosh by the owners Apple Inc. Apple was created by Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs in 1976. In 1984 Apple released their first operating system with the Macintosh 128K model it was referred to as “system software”. In 2007 mac OSx achieved a certified UNIX status
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows was created by Paul Allen and Bill Gates. In 1982 the first version was announced but took two years to ship the first copies of windows 1.0. . Windows introduced users to a point and click interface rather than typing MS-DOC commands. Prior to windows, Microsoft utilized MS-DOS.
The next section will look at the memory operating systems use. Topics that will be covered include; how much, how expensive, and how fast. Then will do into detail how each system manages the memory that is availed to the system.

Through the comparison of the following operating systems; UNIX, Linux, Mac, and Microsoft Windows. (need to review the other sections to write a conclusion that applies)
MEMORY MANAGEMENT

Next to the CPU the memory management systems is the most important aspects of the operating system, of any operating system. There are three main questions that need to be asked when designing any CPU and dealing with the memory of the unit. First, how much memory is needed for that unit. Second, how expensive is the memory for the unit. Second, how expensive is the memory for the unit? Finally, how fast dose the memory need to be? Windows has 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Windows creates its own virtual addresses, and on the 32-bit system there is addressing for four gigabytes of memory. The 64-bit system therefore has addressing for up to eight terabytes. Windows also offers four options within the system for large memory support. The options are 4-gigabyte turning, physical address extensions, address windowing extensions, and large-page support. Windows also offers a large number of functions offered for memory management a few of these functions are