UNIX

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UNIX-tan
Character Information
Common Names	UNIX
Other Names	UNICS
Human Name(s)	Eunice Bell
Faction	Linux Unix Consortium
Lineage	UNIX (matriarch/founder)
Rival(s)	Various
Appearance
Height	153 cm (5 ft 0 in)
Hair Color	Two-tone purple
Eye Color	Two-tone blue
Weapon(s)	Fire magic Various sourceries Aluminum staff
Design
Creator	C-Chan, Bella
First Appearance	2007-09
Technical Information
System Personified	Research UNIX
Developer(s)	AT&T Bell Labs
Debut	1969-07-31 (internal) 1971-11-03 (public)
Latest release	10th Edition, Oct 1989

Technical details

Unix was originally developed in 1969 by AT&T Bell Labs on the PDP-7, an underpowered minicomputer. Because of its development conditions, Unix was a radical departure from OS designs of the day: small, flexible and portable. Later, it was ported to the PDP-11 and rewritten in C.

Since AT&T was barred from entering the computer industry, Unix could not be sold, but was freely distributed to various organizations.

Character details

Physical Design

Unix-tan is depicted as a short, pale-skinned woman in her mid-late teens. She has long, near-black purple hair with lighter streaks, and a pair of dark gray horned owl ears. Her eyes are piercing, intimidating and inquisitive, deep blue with electric blue Bell Laboratory logos implanted over her pupils. She wears brow-line glasses and simple monochrome-colored clothing, most typically boots, a blazer, sweater-vest, shirt, tie and pleated skirt with perforated "UNIX" accents, or a long-sleeved knee-length black dress. Since the early 1990s she has used a wheelchair, either a power model or a portable manual one.

She carries a polished aluminum staff with a variety of inscribed Roman numerals. While it mostly functions as a ceremonial sceptre, it doubles as a weapon. The numbers on its surface symbolize the various tenets of Unix Philosophy.

Personality

Unix-tan possesses strong common sense and survival instincts. Naturally curious, she enjoys learning new things and busying her mind and is rarely seen without a book. Although she began life orphaned and destitute, she caught on in academia, allowing her to attend classes at a number of universities and ultimately receive an excellent education.

Though she is powerful enough to get her way by means of sorcery, she prefers using mind-games to enact her will. So skilled is she at manipulation that she can defeat rivals by using their own psychology against them, or turn enemies into allies. Although she possesses a sense of self-preservation bordering on selfishness, she is not without conscience, showing regret for her transgressions as well as compassion toward those in need.

Unix-tan's values have fluctuated throughout her lifetime. She started off as an unwitting pioneer of Open Sourcery, but abandoned her early ideas on communality for the sake of material gains, turning into a greedy industrialist for a time. The Unix Wars made her reevaluate her morals and she has since returned to her early ethos, becoming an Open Source OS-tan in the process. Throughout her life, she has cultivated and maintained a set of values known as Unix Philosophy, which is practiced by her daughters and acolytes, becoming a cornerstone of their society.

She doesn't hide her feelings and speaks whatever is on her mind, no matter how blunt. She has a notoriously hot temper, issuing reproaches with whacks of her staff. While her foes see this behavior as uncouth, her allies appreciate her commitment to honesty at any cost. Unix-tan demands to be treated in kind, finding sycophantic behavior the most intolerable of all. Her gentler side is known by a select group of friends, as well as the vintage-tans she helps to support at the Binteeji Renmei.

Family and relationships

Her Descendants

Like the Linux-tans and many contemporary OS-tan societies, the Unixes reproduce exogenetically, allowing for large numbers of offspring to be created easily and without personal involvement from their donors. As such, Unix-tan has hundreds of children and grandchildren, all of whom have varying levels of relationship to their "matriarch" due to extensive manipulation.

Unix-tan isn't compassionate towards her family and approaches her children with a "Social Darwinist" attitude, leaving them to fend for themselves so the strongest, most innovative or well-connected reach the top of the family hierarchy, while the weaker ones fade into obscurity or die. She believes a natural-selection approach makes her family stronger, and while it has allowed individuals to rise to power, it has also instilled infighting and undermined their political stability as a group. The most successful of her daughters got stronger after the Unix Wars, but destroyed their less successful kin in the process.

An exception to this attitude is the interest she shows in Mac OS X Leopard-tan. Uncharacteristically, Unix-tan offered patronage to the young genius, going as far as granting her official inclusion in the Unix family. Later, Unix revealed her interest wasn't altruistic, funding Leopard-tan's research in an attempt to spark the creation of time travel technology which Unix-tan could co-opt for her own purposes, specifically performing inter-temporal reconnaissance to ensure success in perpetuity.

With Linux

While originally convinced that the Linux-tans would displace her family as hers' had done to earlier generations, at the end of the Unix Wars Unix-tan realized that the salvation of her people lies with the Linux family. She adopted Linux-tan into their society, and since then the Open Sourceress has ascended to the position of right-hand man to Unix-tan herself.

Although Linux-tan's and Unix-tan's first meeting was fraught with mutual distrust, with time they developed deep respect for each other. Admiration slowly gave way to affection, with shared experiences and complementary personalities making them well suited to each other. They keep their true feelings secret to outsiders to avoid political unrest among their often-opposing offspring and followers.

Vintage OS-tans

Unix-tan is compassionate toward Vintage-tans, out of regret for her role in destroying the world that came before her, and charity for the less powerful. She demonstrates her commitment to making amends by funding the Binteji Renmei, a community dedicated to saving outdated and abandoned OS-tans.

History and Background

Birth and Early Life

After Bell Labs withdrew support for Multics-tan, a modified clone was created in her place. Built with the help of PDP-7-tan and GCOS-tan, she was originally named UNICS, after her mother. Intensely curious about her origins and the secrecy surrounding her birth, she discovered the truth while working her first job at the patent office.

Unix-tan was manipulated by GCOS-tan into hating and fearing Multics-tan, becoming convinced that she alone held the power to vanquish the insane sorceress. Aware of her own inferiority, Unix first tried rallying the help of other OS-tans, but was rejected. She attempted to take on Multics-tan by herself, but found herself no match. Disheartened but determined, she schemed to bring Multics down to her level, but was knocked unconscious in the subsequent altercation. Unix-tan awoke in a state of primal rage, cutting through Multics-tan's defenses while consuming her power, leaving her rival badly injured both physically and magically.

Though she'd proven herself triumphant, Unix-tan was horrified that she almost killed her mother. Her newly awakened powers and stolen sceptre remain to this day as self-imposed reminders of her actions.

Rise to Power

In subsequent years, Unix saw her first children created: BSD-tan, CB Unix-tan and MERT-tan among others. While Unix-tan had initially been communal and cooperatively-minded, she was seduced by the call of capitalism, becoming a successful industrialist in the process. She expanded her political power through a number of successful alliances, in particular with PDP-11-tan, eroding the foothold of rival small OS-tans and endangering the aging, but powerful earlier generation of Mainframe-tans.

As Unix-tan's influence grew, OS-tans of all stripes rallied against her, but it was too late to stop her conquest. By the end of the decade, all of OS-tan society would be reshaped in her image.

Unix Wars

See also: Timeline of The Unix Wars

Secure against outside challenge, the Unixes turned on themselves. Factional infighting grew into all out war as each child attempted to secure dominance and shape the rest of the family in their image. FreeBSD-tan was drafted, but defected to form an independent faction. Unix-tan's heir, Plan 9-tan abdicated the throne in protest.

Unix-tan resided at the top of a "pyramid" in the Unix family, with each of her children and grandchildren contributing a part of their life-force and power to her. The discord was severe enough to damage this supply chain, leaving Unix-tan in frail physical condition. Worst still was the deep trauma inflicted by seeing her children attrition themselves to death. Unix thought that a champion would emerge, but it seemed all they could do was destroy the collective.

Uncertain that her family would survive without outside intervention, Unix-tan embraced Linux-tan against the wishes of her highest lieutenants. Together they formed a symbiotic alliance with old power exchanged for new ideas.

See also

• Wikipedia article on Unix
• Wikipedia article on the Unix philosophy