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LINUX: Getting Acquainted

Before understanding the LINUX and its history, let’s take a look at what made it possible in the first place, the predecessors of LINUX.

Birth of Linux

In the early digital era, all the operating systems that were made specifically for the hardware that they were going to be consumed upon and the interaction between two machines was not possible. So, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson of AT&T fame authored the UNIX system. First, it was written in a Low-level language (Assembly Language) until 1973, when it was rewritten in C (A language invented by Ritchie himself, how cool is that!). Later University of California, Berkeley combined various ‘then existing’ flavors of UNIX into one and added the very famed vi-editor tool.

They also added the legendary network protocol software TCP/IP that governs the internet today.

MIT later introduced ‘X Windows’ — the first windowing system for UNIX. At this point, UNIX was profoundly commercialized. But Linus Torvald and Richard Stallman made the free UNIX flavor LINUX that was handled and distributed under GNU general public license. The GNU mandates the developer and seller to make the source code public, which is ultimately the essence of LINUX.

The Open Source Revolution

Distributing Linux under GNU general public license was a vital decision made by Linus and team, the notion of having helping hands all across the globes was about to change the sub-terrain of software. This activity of letting the world contribute to a cause is “Open Sourcing” and the projects involved are called “OpenSource Projects” and the software being “OpenSource software”. This raises a question, how would the project/team benefit if its free? Of course, the development/maintenance of the project is not free. It requires some resources. resources like time, human efforts, machines, etc.

There are many things that compensate the resource that was invested in an opensource software, compensations like:

  1. Some part of the software is private and you’ll have to pay for the acquisition.
  2. Companies pay for giant “opensource software foundations” maintenance. (Ex: companies like Red Hat, IBM, and Microsoft pay their employees to contribute to Linux development)
  3. Custom build plugin for customers can be a source of funds.
  4. There are many markets based on open source software. Ex: Stock exchange is majorly powered by LINUX.
  5. The satisfaction in making the world a better place.

Keeping the giant alive

LINUX is developed and maintained collaboratively across countries and continents, Developer all around the globe submit fixes, additional features, the proposal of removal of any lines, etc to the project. These “changes” are called a “patch”, once submitted these patches are scrutinized by LINUX foundation internal review team which include personnel like senior Linux kernel developer, Linux creator and foundation fellows.

Let’s summarize the details in a timeline factor:

1969: The Beginning: The history of UNIX starts back in 1969, when Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others started working on the “little-used PDP-7 in a corner” at Bell Labs and what was to become UNIX.

1971: First Edition: It had an assembler for a PDP-11/20, file system, fork(). It was used for text processing of patent documents.

1973: Fourth Edition: It was rewritten in C. This made it portable and changed the history of OS.

1984: 4.2BSD: University of California at Berkeley releases 4.2BSD, includes TCP/IP, new signals and much more.

1991: Commencing LINUX: UNIX System Laboratories (USL) becomes a company - majority-owned by AT&T. Linus Torvalds commences LINUX development. Solaris 1.0 debuts.

Richard Stallman wrote in forums on net.unix-wizards in 1983, declaring about the new “Free UNIX” project that he was working:

“…Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed…”

Linus Torvald announced the new “Hobby OS” that he was working on, on a website’ forum comp.os.minix, this is what he wrote:

“… 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. …”

Intrigued to read the original messages and discussion posted by Linus and Richard over the internet!? Google maintains a group of the original posts, go right ahead, check it out:

  1. Richard Stallman: https://groups.google.com/forum/net.unix-wizards
  2. Linus Torvald: https://groups.google.com/forum/comp.os.minix