Where has Linux come from?
The demise of Commodore led many users to ignore other operating
systems. Now that the Amiga is destined to incorporate part of the
Linux kernel it is important to learn where the operating system
came from. The origin of Linux lies with the Unix operating system.
Unix was created in 1969 for use with multitasking system for
minicomputers and mainframes. By the mid-1970's it was a highly
successful business operating system, competing with the likes of
CP/M. Versions of Unix exist for many systems ranging from personal
computers to supercomputers.
In the early 1990's Unix had grown into a monolithic beast
capable of most things. However it lacked the user support from the
consumer market. The growth of Unix did not come from the operating
system itself but the derivatives that became available, such as
Minix, NetBSD and Linux. Linux was originally developed as a hobby
project by Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
It was inspired by Minix, a small UNIX system developed by Andy
Tanenbaum. Since its inception Linux has been open source, allowing
anyone around the world to improve different areas of the operating
system. The very early development of Linux was mostly dealing with
the task-switching features of the 80386 protected-mode interface,
all written in assembly code. In a Usenet posting Linus wrote about
the early history of Linux,
"After that it was plain sailing: hairy coding
still, but I had some devices, and debugging was easier. I started
using C at this stage, and it certainly speeds up developement.
This is also when I start to get serious about my megalomaniac
ideas to make 'a better Minix than Minix'. I was hoping I'd be able
to recompile gcc under Linux some day..."
"Two months for basic setup, but then only slightly longer
until I had a disk-driver (seriously buggy, but it happened to work
on my machine) and a small filesystem. That was about when I made
0.01 available [around late August of 1991]: it wasn't pretty, it
had no floppy driver, and it couldn't do much anything. I don't
think anybody ever compiled that version. But by then I was hooked,
and didn't want to stop until I could chuck out
Minix.''
The first official version of Linux, 0.02 was announced on 5th
October 1991. It was still pretty basic, only able to run BASH
(Bourne Again SHell) and gcc (the GNU C compiler). User support was
ignored in favour of kernel development. A revealing statement
that, only since 1998 has begun to change. One Linux web site
refers to such improvement as "secondary programming", in
comparison to improving the Kernel development. Multimedia
extensions were ignored until the latter part of the 90's, leading
to Linux being considered unsuitable for such tasks. It is hoped
the Amiga OE will finally bring some kind of support to this area.
It was not until 1994 that a release version of Linux was
released. This represented the result that Linus' had dreamed of 3
years previous. Since then a great deal has changed. At the time of
writing, version 2.2 has been released and there are high
expectations of 2.4. Linux has turned into a highly successful
operating system (thanks in part to CopyLeft and GNU) used by a
wide range of people and businesses. Sony chose it as the
development OS for their Playstation 2 console. There are versions
of Linux available for a range of systems, ranging from the C64 to
the Sparc. In 1999 Linux has been considered a threat to the
Windows monopoly. The frightening thing for Microsoft is the
prospect that Linux could actually win. Who would have ever guessed
that this tiny Unix clone would have grown up to take on the entire
world of personal computing?
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