Linux History

First, we should look back at UNIX’s origins, since the two operate so similarly that they could be called siblings. UNIX originated at Bell Labs in 1969 for internal use at AT&T, developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Other companies later licensed its source code and modified it into their own products, including AIX (IBM), HP/UX (Hewlett-Packard), SunOS or Solaris (SUN), and IRIX (SGI). Because UNIX operating systems were expensive at the time, Linus Torvalds (the father of Linux) created the UNIX-like Linux kernel. He announced it in the comp.os.minix newsgroup in August 1991. From: [email protected] (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: What would you like to see most in minix? Summary: small poll for my new operating system Message-ID: [email protected] 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, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-) Linus ([email protected]) 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 :-(.