A Brief History of Linux
In the early 90s, the world of computers was dominated by a bare-bones operating system known as DOS. While Macintosh and UNIX were significantly more advanced, they had astronomical prices that made them all but impossible for PC users to obtain.
The obvious solution came in the form of MINIX. It was developed by US-born Dutch professor Andrew S. Tanenbaum to teach his students the inner workings of an operating system. Although MINIX wasn't an advanced system, it had the advantage that the source code was available. For the first time, programmers could dissect the inner workings of an operating system and modify the code as they saw fit.
One of these programmers was Linus Benedict Torvalds.
In 1991, 21 year old Torvalds was a second year student of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. Although he loved to test the limits of computers, he lacked an operating system that could meet his demands. While MINIX was a step in the right direction, it was designed as a teaching tool rather than an industry quality OS. At the same time, cult hero Richard Stallman was working on the development of the GNU kernel HURD, but that was not scheduled to come out for a few years.
On August 25, 1991 Linus announced that he was working on a pet project modeled after MINIX with the following post to the MINIX news group:
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready.I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system(due to practical reasons) among other things). I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40),and things seem to work.This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, andI'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-) Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.
By mid September, Linus had released Linux version 0.01. Its source code was downloaded, tweaked and sent back to Linus by hundreds of enthusiasts and on October 5, version 0.02 was released. Version 0.03 was released a few weeks later and by December version 0.10 was out. Despite community support, at this point Linux only had support for AT hard disks and had no login. Version 0.11 brought better support for multilingual keyboards, floppy disk drivers, and support for EGA, VGA and Hercules.
Soon, commercial vendors moved in. Companies such as Red Hat and Caldera packaged Linux based systems in a more distributable format and gained a substantial following from users worldwide. While there were many commercial ventures, there were also dedicated programmers who created a volunteer-based distribution, the now-famous Debian. With the advent of new Graphical User Interfaces such as KDE and GNOME, these Linux distributions quickly became popular.
Thanks to it's ever growing user base, the Linux code was ported to many different platforms, enabling its use on everything from 3Com's PalmPilot to PowerPC and even Intel's Xeon Microprocessor. This incredible portability is unmatched by any other operating system today.
But whatever happened to the man who first envisioned this incredible operating system? Unlike Microsoft's Bill Gates, Linus is not a billionaire. After completing his studies, he moved to the US and got a job working as a developer for Transmeta Corporation. He now has a wife, Tove, and daughter, Patricia Miranda. Despite his simplicity, Linus remains the most famous and popular programmer on the planet.
You can find more information about the history of Linux here and a time line is available here.
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