The history of Unix and Linux

Before 1965, the input of the computer was complex and slow, whereas the CPU of the computer was very fast in data processing of the input, so the CPU was idle for the input of the data most of the time. So there was an urgent need for an operating system that allowed one computer to use multiple people at the same time and handle multiple tasks simultaneously.

In 1965, the Bell Laboratory at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (T), the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT) at MIT and the American General Electric Company (GE) jointly developed a multi-tasking, multi-user operating system called Multcis. Later, as the Multics project was too ambitious, the project was lost, and the project was declared unsuccessful around 1969, with all three companies withdrawing.

At the time, many engineers at Bell Labs had relied on the Multics system to work, and because of the Bell Lab's exit, they could not continue to use Multics. Ken Thompson was one of them, when he was developing a game called "Space Travel", and without the Multics system to run the game, the game project was naturally shelved. Later, Ken found a lab-eliminated PDP-7 (then a small computer device) in the corner of the lab, so he decided to develop an operating system on the device to run the "Space travel" game. After a period of effort, Ken's operating system began to prototype, he called it UNICs. Later, Ken was pleased to recommend his "Space travel" game in his colleagues, but everyone is not interested in his game, he developed the UNICs operating system is very interested in, we have to install learning to use.

1969, an accidental opportunity, Ken by taking over a new project to obtain a then the highest matching PDP equipment, Ken unsanitary environment, began to vigorously develop his unics, at this time UNICs has been widely spread in the Bell Laboratory, Ken, a colleague Dennis Ritchie also joined the development of the UNICs system, which also changed its name to UNIX.

Dennis and Ken found that because UNIX was developed on PDP devices, the system could only run on PDP devices, so that their systems could run on different hardware platforms, they had to transplant and rewrite the system over and over again, So they wanted to rewrite the system using a language that was more advanced than assembler. There was a well-known scripting language called B, but the performance was poor and simplistic, and they improved the B language, called C. The powerful C language was born!

In 1974, Ken and Dennis jointly published a paper on Unix, so Unix was widely known, and many people wanted to acquire the system for research and study. As Ken and Dennis were employees of the Bell Lab, the UNIX nature they developed belonged to the Bell Lab, when at/T was ruled by the United States Supreme Court antitrust law that it could not sell anything other than telephone cables, so that UNIX was freely available to the institutions of society, With the concerted efforts of everyone, UNIX is becoming more sophisticated by adding many new features and features.

In 1977, Bill Joy of Berkeley University (founder of Sun) modified the Unix source code for his machine, called BSD (Berkeley software distribution). From BSD onwards, the major manufacturers and commercial companies based on their own hardware architecture, and the BSD system based on the development of UNIX systems, resulting in a number of different versions of the UNIX operating system.

In 1979, the Bell Lab was independent from T-T, so that he was no longer subject to the antitrust restrictions of the previous court, so the opening of Unix was withdrawn by Bell Labs, and agencies abandoned UNIX because they could not afford the royalties on Unix. There were already many companies, such as Hp,ibm,sun,microsoft, who relied on packaging to distribute UNIX for commercial gain, and the Bell Lab's move naturally caused many commercial disputes and was a major blow to the development of UNIX.

After UNIX is withdrawn from the open, universities are not free to use. Andrew Tanenbaum, a professor at the University of Helsinki in Finland, has written a system, called the Minix,minix system, that is fully compatible with UNIX, in order to speak to his students about the operating system. Similarly, Minix was developed by Andrew on his own computer and could not be installed on other computers, and some of his students wrote the driver for Minx for Minx to run on other devices, but Andrew was reluctant to add these drivers to the system in order to ensure the purity of the code. Therefore, students feel very depressed, which includes graduate Linus Torvalds. After careful study of Minix's design ideas, Linus decided to refer to Minix to write an operating system.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds developed the Lniux kernel for 386 machines based on GCC and bash after studying the design ideas of Minix.

In 1993, Torvalds released linux-v1.0, and Linux turned to the GPL;

In 1994, the first commercially released version of Linux was Slackware;

In 1996, Torvalds released linux-v2.0, which identified the Linux mascot: Penguins.

At this point, Linux is finally born! We have to say that these people are really bull.

This article from "Dream of a Lake of Water" blog, reproduced please contact the author!

The history of Unix and Linux