The birth history of Linux

The birth of the ancient memory-unix multics plan--begin.

This is an operating system project operated by MIT, General Electric and T-Bell Labs for use on the GE-645 mainframe. But because the whole goal is too large, Multics released some products, but the performance is very low, at the end of the Mulitcs project, and the plan to terminate. Ken Thomson also took part in the project, and unfortunately, the mutilate plan ended when he joined the project. GE-645 was still at Bell Labs, and Ken Thomson continued to develop software on the machine, when he wrote a program language Bon. Wrote a space travel game, however, the game runs slowly and is expensive.

Later, GE-645 was moved, Ken Thomson found several PDP-7. With the help of Dennislich, Thomson rewritten the game with PDP-7 's assembly language and ran it on PDP-7, plus the experience of the Multics project, prompting Thomson to start studying how to develop the operating system on Dec PDP-7.

In 1969, Thomson proposed the development of a new hierarchical operating system plan on PDP-7. Multics the original member plus Rudd Canady, all put into this plan. Later, write-driven, development shell, in cooperation with the team, finally made a time-sharing multitasking operating system, became the first version of UNIX. This project is known as UNICs (uniplexed information and Computing System)

Thomson and Dennislich

Because PDP-7 performance was not good, Thomson and Dennislich decided to transplant the first version of UNIX to PDP-11/20 machine, after the performance improvement, really can be used for many people (previously only supported two users), and formally renamed UNIX. Later, after Thomson and Ricky invented the C language in 1971, they rewritten Unix in the C language in 1973 to form a third edition. After the rapid development of UNIX, developed rapidly, and is widely used.

Since UNIX is almost completely free at this point, many organizations have rewritten UNIX on this basis, forming a variety of "Unix-like" versions, including the Berkshire Package (BSD) product developed by the University of California, Berkeley. Later, after the separation of Bell Labs and at/T, the UNIX source code was no longer licensed to academic institutions, and copyright rights were declared on previous UNIX and its variants, and a long-lasting copyright lawsuit was initiated until Novell took over. Novell employs a more enlightened approach, allowing Berkeley to freely release its own UNIX variants, but only if the code from the-T is completely removed.

The product of Freedom-BSD

The Berkeley Software Suite (English: Berkeley software Distribution, abbreviated to BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix (Berkeley Unix), is the name of an operating system. Derived from UNIX, the 1970 's was created by Bill Joy, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and is used to represent the various Bill joy that derive from it.

BSD is often used as a workstation-class Unix system, thanks to the very loose BSD User license, many of the computer companies established in the 1980 have benefited from BSD, more notable examples such as Dec Ultrix, and Sun's SunOS. In the 1990 's, BSD was largely superseded by system V 4.x and OSF/1 systems, but its open source version was adopted to promote the development of the Internet.

The generation of the GNU program

Richard Storman

Because of the commercialization of UNIX operating system, the original Unxi system can no longer be used arbitrarily, many people want to have a free operating system, because not everyone is very rich, and not everyone can self-willed to write the operating system, at this time, Richard ·    Stallman launched the GNU program at the MIT AI Lab, hoping to develop a complete set of open source operating systems to replace UNIX, the planned operating system, called GNU. Richard Storman announced the plan in the Net.unix-wizards and Net.usoft newsgroups on September 27, 1983. In this program, we have developed many common tools that we are now familiar with, including the GNU Compiler Suite (GCC), the GNU C Library (GLIBC), and the GNU Core Tools Group (coreutils). It is also the GNU Cash Shell [10] and the GNOME desktop environment in the GNU Debugger (GDB), GNU Binary utility (binutils) [15]. Of course, the GNU program is designed to develop a free-spread operating system called Hurd, but because of the high requirements for the operating system, Hurd has been in the testing phase, but later Linux joined the GNU to compensate for the vacancy.

Fuse Minix

Minix Start Interface

After Unix was created, copyright at T-T, after the release of version 7 Unix, the release of new licensing terms, the UNIX source code to be privatized, in the university can no longer use Unix source, professor of Computer science Department of Amsterdam Free University in the Netherlands to teach, Wrote a small UNIX-like system, named Minix (meaning Mini-unix).

The generation of Linux

Linnastovaz (Linus Torvalds)

Our protagonist, Linnastovaz (Linus Torvalds), was curious about the operating system when Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in 1991. Because but the 386BSD hasn't come out yet. However, he did not like the MS-DOS operating system on his 386 computer, so he installed the Minix, but was dissatisfied with the Minix only allowed to use education (at the time Minix was not allowed to be used for any commercial use), so he began to write his own operating system.

The first version of Linux was released on the Internet by the University FTP server administrator Ari Lemmke in September 1991, initially Torvalds called the kernel the name "Freax", meaning Freedom ("free") and singularity ("Freak" ), and attach the word "X" to this commonly used letter to match the so-called Unix-like system. But the FTP server administrator suspected the name of the original "Freax" is not pleasant, the kernel address to "Linux", then only 10000 lines of code, still must run on the Minix operating system, and must use the hard disk boot , then released in the second edition of October (0.02), while the Finnish university student in Helsinki posted a message on Comp.os.minix.

Hello everybody out there using Minix-i ' m doing a (free) operation system (just a hobby, won ' t is big and professional Li Ke GNU) for 386 (486) at clones.

In March 1994, the Linux1.0 edition was officially released. In order for Linux to be commercially available, Linus Torvalds decided to change his original agreement (which would restrict commercial use) in lieu of the GNU GPL agreement. Many developers then converged on the GNU element into Linux, making a fully functional, free operating system.

Logo for Linux

The logo and mascot of Linux is a penguin named Tux, the origin of which is because Linus was bitten by a penguin in a zoo in Australia and chose penguins as a sign of Linux. It is more acceptable to say that penguins represent Antarctica, and Antarctica is a land common to the world. This also means Linux is everyone's Linux.

The status of Linux

Today led by Linus Torvalds, numerous development partners are involved in the development and maintenance of the Linux kernel. The Free Software Foundation, led by Richard Stallman, continues to offer a large number of GNU components that support the Linux kernel. Some of the non-GNU components of third parties developed by individuals and businesses also provide support for the Linux kernel, which includes a large number of works, kernel modules and user applications and libraries. The Linux community or enterprise has introduced some important Linux distributions, including the Linux kernel, GNU components, non-GNU components, and other forms of package management system software.

The birth history of Linux