Linux History

Introduction

Hello everyone today we going to start new series talking about Linux from every aspic. Most of these information going to be from the Linux Programming Interface Book Am planning to go throw everything in my journey of reading it, it a huge book around 1500 pages so this going to be long ride so let's get right into it.

Linux History and C

So going at the very first beginning, The first UNIX implementation was in the year 1969 surprisingly the same year Linus (The inventor of Linux) born in. The first version of it was writing in Assembly. Mr. Thompson was one of the guys that have been inspire by the design of the Unix which at the time was called MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) such tree like file structure, a Shell and more.

In 1970 the UNIX operating system was fully implemented in Assembly which we can understand that its very hard to code and maintained but the people at the time was smart. Anyway Dennis Ritchie, one of Thompson’s colleagues at Bell Labo-ratories has implemented The C Programming Language The best programming language, However at the time it was not the C that we know today it was very minimal no stdlib no nothing. Moreover around 1973 The C has the power to implement the whole Unix from Assembly to C. Skipping more of history we going to reach to 1975 which hosted the first Unix edition that was outside AT&T.

GNU project.

So in 1984 a talented programmer Richard Stallman whom was working in MIT want to work on a free Unix implementation. The believes of Richard Stallman was amazing and inspire. He believes that software such OS would be available at no/ very low cost. Richard Stallman has stood against the restrictions that placed on proprietary OS that prevent the owner of the OS from ever seening the source code of the OS it self. So what did Richard Stallman do he started GNU Which stand for rather a funny name GNU not UNIX which aimed to develop a Unix Like OS that entirely free open for any changes and modification so if you have it you can do what ever you want in the source code.

In 1985, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a non- profit organization to support the GNU project as well as the development of free software in general.

That was a very small history about the guy who started the legendary GNU move.

Linux Kernel.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds a Finnish student at the University of Helsinki. So this guys was inspire to write an OS for his Intel 80386 PC. And from there he started he comes to contact with Minix a small Unix-like OS kernel developed in the mid-1980s by Andrew Tanenbaum a university professor. Anyway the source code for that kernel was fully open source and was design for his education. However the Minix kernel was not able to run on 386 system. So that was inspire Linus to start creating a project that aimed to make efficient, fully-featured UNIX kernel to run on the 386. Over the months Linux was able to make a basic kernel that allow him to run various GNU programs. On October 5th, 1991, Linus request the help of other programmers and make a message that include the following.

Do you pine for the nice days of Minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on Minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you. As I mentioned a month ago, I’m working on a free version of a Minix-look-alike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage where it’s even usable (though may not be depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is just version 0.02 . . . but I’ve successfully run bash, gcc, gnu-make, gnu-sed, compress, etc. under it

ending and summary.

UNIX was first created in 1969 by Ken Thompson at Bell Labs on a PDP-7, later rewritten in C by Dennis Ritchie and moved to the PDP-11 in 1973. AT&T distributed UNIX (with source code) to universities, leading to its widespread academic adoption. The University of California at Berkeley developed BSD in 1979, while AT&T released System V after its monopoly breakup.

GNU, launched by Richard Stallman in the 1980s, aimed to create a free UNIX-like system but lacked a kernel. In 1991, Linus Torvalds built the Linux kernel, which grew with community contributions.

Differences among UNIX variants drove standardization: C was standardized (C89, C99), and operating system standards like POSIX (1988, 1990) and the Single UNIX Specification (SUS) followed, later consolidated into POSIX/SUSv3 (2001) and POSIX/SUSv4 (2008).

Linux differs from commercial UNIX by separating kernel development from distributions. Various Linux distros package the stable kernel with patches. The Linux Standard Base (LSB) works to ensure compatibility across distributions.

Notes.

There are a lot of things that i skipped such versioning and and standers which take a big part of this section so if you are interested i advice you to read that section of the book as it goes into the details about that.