The emergence of Linux is closely related to the developments in UNIX. The penguin from Linux is a clone of the one from Unix, and thus it inherited many of its features. The truly UNIX computer in the world appeared in 1971, when the first edition appeared for various servers. It was the promoter of other operating systems, today famous, namely developed by Sun Microsystems: Solaris and BSD Berkeley: IRIX and of those from Silicon Graphics. In 1975, it was launched a version of Unix, that was rewritten in C and Assembler, the two becoming a standard language for writing programs for these platforms.
But without the existence of a man named Richard Stallman, Linux will never managed to become what it is today, even if no one thought in the 80s years the release of this operating system. Stallman began his career in 1970 at the famous MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, creating text editors, well known worldwide. During the ’80s, he was known for the software that companies wanted to use in order to protect their investments, thus the companies tried to sign different contracts with the emplyees not to disclose the source code of the developed products. Stallman did not agree with this attitude and in 1985 published the manifesto GNU (GNU is Not UNIX), that presented the open-source concept.
The principle was simple and was quickly adopted by the supporters of Stallman: the software source code should be accessible to everyone, to allow different developers around the world to modify and improve it, possibly correcting some mistakes in programming. Later came the GPL (GNU General Public License) license, an “anticopyright” structure, that reinforced the status of the open source. Many programmers have supported him in 1984; they founded the development program of the GCC compiler (GNU C Compiler), a real value at the time. The source code is available under the GPL, often reaching the free versions of UNIX applications, which have fewer errors.
The year 1987 was marked by the emergence of the operating system Minix, a UNIX clone made available by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Minix was a response to producers’ decision to keep secret the UNIX sources. Although there was an unusual system, it had the sources available and thus generated a great success among students and developers, curious to understand in depth the functioning of an operating system. The original version of MINIX had 12000 lines of code, was written in C and Assembler and was designed for Intel platforms, which were very easy to purchase at that time.
However the big problem was not solved by the GNU movement because there is still a kernel to be developed, a piece needed by the system to become fully operational; the other components were already made. For Stallman, Minix was not a viable alternative, and his vision and other programmers’ was writing a core that could mean a work of several years. But a computer science student named Linus Torvalds begins to work on a new operating system that would revolutionize the thinking of the open-source site offering exactly the missing component: a kernel. Originally Linus wanted by designing the operating system no more than to demonstrate the ability of the program, but later it turned into a desire to provide an alternative to the DOS operating system from Microsoft or Apple Macintosh systems, high performant, but inaccessible because of the price for a normal user. He also wanted to create something better than UNIX, which in turn was very expensive.
It all started on August 25, 1991 when Linus posted in a MINIX newsgroup the following message: Subject: What do you want most from the Minix operating system? The answers started to come.
Linus’s enthusiasm was rewarded in full. After the September 1991 version 0.01 was released on the Internet, many developers have modified it and produced versions, which have been posted on Minix newsgroups, which has contributed to the delay of the version 0.02 (which was released on October 5, 1991). As Linus says in the message, the first version only supports AT hard disk drives and had no login (it booted directly). The version 0.11 has been equipped with support for keyboard, for floppy disk drives, for displays, VGA, EGA. A spectacular jump was performed with the transition from version 0.12 to 0.95, motivated by the fact that the kernel is sufficiently stable to be checked and switched to a much higher number.
Adverse reactions occurred, especially from the creator of Minix: “I still maintain my opinion that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 was a fundamental error.” Backed by the newly-formed Linux community, Linus replied: “Your mission is to be a professor and researcher. This is a very good excuse for programming errors in Minix”.
These events were not slowing the momentum of the community, which is even greater today. Thus, from a user in 1991 and 12000 lines of code, Linux has gained great popularity in the coming year with 1000 users, 20000 users in 1993 and reaching 7.5 million users and 1.5 million lines of code in 1998. In comparison, Microsoft Windows 2000 product was made of 27 million lines of code. Also, the implementation of graphical interfaces had a big impact on users, even if at first they did not compare with what other operating systems offered in this regard. Linux was licensed under the GPL, so the source code could be copied and modified by anyone. Another advantage of this choice was that when the market has a new hardware product, anyone who possessed a driver could write and post it on a website so that it can be used or improved by other people around the world.
The following period was marked by the emergence of a growing number of Linux developers, which led to the development of versions by default (later called distributions). They are usually distinguished by the software packages offered; some of the distributions require to pay a fee, usually modest.
Impressed by the enthusiasm of the Linux community, many companies have established relationships with it, including among them Motorola, IBM and Dell. A huge success was the company Red Hat, which in 1999 managed to establish itself by providing technical support to users and companies using this distribution.
Linux has had a huge success in science. An example is the experiment at Livermore National Laboratory in Los Angeles where the students made a cluster of 68 PCs running Linux in order to study the effects of atomic shocks. The total cost amounted to approximately $ 152000, or about one tenth of the cost of using commercial operating systems. Interesting is that this system did not require a reboot after three months of functioning.
