UNIX

A software operating system.

A very large and constantly evolving language with several alternative and largely incompatible syntaxes, in which anyone can define anything any way they choose, and usually do. Speakers of this language think it's easy to learn because it's so easily twisted to one's own ends, but dialectical differences make tribal intercommunication nearly impossible, and travelers are often reduced to a pidgin-like subset of the language. To be universally understood, a Unix shell programmer must spend years of study in the art. Many have abandoned this discipline and now communicate via an Esperanto-like language called Perl.

In ancient times, Unix was also used to refer to some code that a couple of people at Bell Labs wrote to make use of a PDP-7 computer that wasn't doing much of anything else at the time.

™: A portable, multiuser, time-shared operating system that supports process scheduling, job control, and a programmable user interface. Note 1: There are many proprietary operating systems that are based on UNIX™ and are commonly referred to as UNIX™, but are not necessarily interoperable. Note 2: Most UNIX™-based operating systems are POSIX compliant.