So I was reading Wikipedia and this stuff goes way over my head. A few questions I have: Unix - its history and why are things "Unix-like" today? The main concept of kernels How do the backbones of Windows or Mac OS compare to Unix, and Linux for that matter? The NT kernel and concept and anything else related to these.
Those are some broad questions. A kernel, with respect to operating systems, is the piece of software which abstracts the underlying hardware for applications and provides basic facilities like memory management, process management, I/O, various system calls. Say you write and compile a program, and you want to execute it. The OS kernel takes care of loading the program into memory, allotting "time slices" for the program on the processor, providing low level interfaces for I/O (e.g. printing to the screen, reading input from the keyboard), catching and handling illegal accesses to memory, and more. More generally, a kernel is a core computation in a software program. In scientific computing, for instance, large applications often have a few kernels of interest which are highly intensive computational loops which take up the majority of the compute time. Wikipedia, or a good introductory textbook on operating systems, could probably tell you more.
At least put them in the form of a question if you're going to ask us. What exactly do you want to know? It used to be that UNIX was without some GUI and it was all command-driven, and applications for UNIX were server-based and intensive. Nowadays, Linux is more the GUI and broad personal computing-based applications and most industries will use Linux for smoother, more efficient, high-load using applications. Meh, I'm blabbering about nothing. Just wikipedia LINUX and UNIX, man.
Those questions are overly broad, and you should just do the research and find a more in depth understanding. Just google. As others have said, we're not doing your homework for you.
One of the main great things about Unix is that everything's a file. Everything. Mac OS X, based on Unix, is the same. So is the Microsoft .NET framework; it was designed by Unix guys. You don't have do deal with Windows Registry, the worst thing ever created ever ever.
I also like how in Unix, almost all configuration is stored in text files. Text maybe isn't space-efficient, but its really the best way to store information.
