History Of Linux

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student from Finland, started Linux as a personal project to develop a new, free operating system kernel.

The Linux kernel has seen continuous expansion throughout its lifetime. After its source code was first released in 1991, it has expanded from a small number of C files that were not allowed to be distributed commercially to the 4.15 version in 2018, which has more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not including comments.

The source code is distributed under the GNU General Public License v2 with a syscall exception, which means that anything that uses the kernel through system calls is not subject to the GNU GPL.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, both of whom worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, created and built the Unix operating system in 1969. The initial version of Unix was launched in 1970, after AT&T had withdrawn from the Multics project.

Later they rebuilt it in a new programming language, C, to make it portable. Unix was adopted, copied, and changed by many academic institutions and enterprises because it was readily available and could be easily moved from one place to another.

The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at UC Berkeley created the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) in 1977. The BSD was based on the 6th edition of Unix and UNIX/32V (7th edition) from AT&T. In the early 1990s, AT&T initiated a lawsuit against the University of California (USL v. BSDi) because BSD incorporated Unix code that AT&T controlled. This greatly restricted the growth and acceptance of BSD.

In 1980, Onyx Systems started offering Unix workstations that were based on microcomputers. Sun Microsystems, which was established as a spin-off of a student project at Stanford University, also started selling Unix-based desktop workstations in 1982.

Although Sun workstations did not use the same commodity PC hardware that Linux was subsequently designed for, they were the first successful commercial effort to distribute a microcomputer that mainly served a single user and ran a Unix operating system.

Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project in 1983 with the intention of developing a free operating system that is similar to UNIX.He authored the GNU General Public License (GPL) as part of this endeavor.

By the beginning of the 1990s, there was almost enough software available to develop a complete operating system. On the other hand, the GNU kernel, known as Hurd, did not get sufficient development attention, resulting in an unfinished version of GNU.

The 80386, which was the first x86 microprocessor to include a 32-bit instruction set and a memory management unit with paging, was produced by Intel in 1985.

The Design of the UNIX Operating System was published by Maurice J. Bach, who worked at AT&T Bell Labs, in 1986. This complete explanation mostly focused on the System V Release 2 kernel, but it also included some new features from Release 3 and BSD.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum launched MINIX in 1987. This Unix-like system was designed for academic usage and was meant to demonstrate the ideas that he discussed in his textbook, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation.

Although the source code for the system was accessible, it could not be changed or redistributed. Furthermore, the 16-bit design of MINIX was not a good fit for the 32-bit capabilities of the Intel 386 architecture, which was becoming more affordable and popular for personal computers. In the early 1990s, a commercial UNIX operating system for Intel 386 PCs was too costly for individual consumers.

These issues, together with the absence of a free kernel that was widely used, motivated Torvalds to begin his effort. He has said that he probably would not have created his own kernel if either the GNU Hurd or 386BSD kernels had been available at the time.