Linux History
Introduction
Linux History
1969
All modern operating systems have their roots in 1969 when Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson developed the C programming language and the Unix operating system at AT&T Bell Labs.
They shared their source code publicly. By 1975, when AT&T started selling Unix commercially, about half of the source code was written by others.
People were not happy that a commercial company sold software that they had written. The resulting legal battle ended in there being two versions of Unix.
- The Official AT&T Unix
- The Free BSD Unix.
Development of BSD still active today.
1980s
In the Eighties many companies started developing their own Unix. The result was many different ways to do the same thing.
Richard Stallman, aimed to end this era of Unix separation and everybody re-inventing the wheel by starting the GNU project (GNU is Not Unix).
His goal was to make an operating system that was freely available to everyone, and where everyone could work together.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux
1990s
The Nineties started with Linus Torvalds a Swedish speaking Finnish student, writing a brand new kernel.
He put the source code online, thinking it would never support anything but 386 hardware. Many people embraced it, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Today
Today Linux is by far the most commonly used operating system in the world.
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100% of the world's supercomputers
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80% of all smart phones
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70% of web servers