*nix

The history of underground computer art is primarily one concerned with the affairs of [microcomputer]s in the home office (or "[computer room]") and the software for their [operating system]s ([Microsoft]'s [MS-DOS] on [IBM PC]s and their clones, [Workbench] for [Commodore] [Amiga]s, [GEM] for [Atari ST]s), but in the '90s it began to have substantial intersection with the Internet and its technologies (eg. [e-mail], [FTP] servers, [IRC], MUDs and the web) which tended to run on [minicomputer]s in universities on very different operating systems -- generally, variations of Ken Thompson's 1969 [UNIX] developed at [Bell Labs], playfully named in response to [MIT]'s [Multics] for [mainframe]s in 1964.

Over the years UNIX splintered and forked into a wild array of different and sometimes mutually incompatible varieties, including System V, Solaris, but notably BSD, [NExTstep] (and through it, OSX), and the ultimate successor to its legacy, [Linux] (and its own ecosystem of distributions.) Use of the leading asterisk [wildcard] symbol here is intended to denote shared qualities common to the entire ecosystem of UNIX-like operating systems.

While in the early '90s you would likely only be conversant with UNIX if you studied computer science or worked at a bank, with the explosion of the Internet (and especially the web) and its burgeoning ecosystem of web designers and [sysadmin]s, it became a lot more useful for a lot more people to have a little UNIX in their skillset. In the 21st century directly interacting with a UNIX system (albeit often through some layers of user-friendly abstraction, as with Apple's OSX) is practically an everyday affair, but even back in the old days, due to the *NIXes frequently being operated as CLI systems through text terminals, some elements of textmode art culture (such as Figlet) originated there.