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Essay on Origin of Linux
Introduction
UNIX came to be back in 1969 and has evolved a great deal since then. It was re-implemented in C during 1972-1974, and is therefore the first source-portable operating system. Currently there are a wide variety of implementations of it, with varying degrees of compatibility, from a variety of vendors - Sun, Silicon Graphics, SCO, HP, IBM, etc.
It quickly became a favorite among programmers and serious technical types, which significantly shaped its evolution to make it a very friendly and powerful OS for the kinds of uses that those types tended to put it to. The early dominion of AT&T, its high cost, and, as time went on, the greater disparities between other versions of the OS created a great need for a common, free Unix-like OS (Sumit, 2001).
Another interesting thing was happening as well. By 1990, personal computers had finally gotten to the point where they had the power and essential features (virtual memory, memory protection, etc.) necessary to host a Unix-like OS. So some Intel-based Unices were developed, including Minix. But Minix was not truly free, and had some problems. So in 1991 a Finnish student named Linux Torvalds began developing a kernel, and quickly developed a following on the Internet
Like many great ideas or inventions, Linux was born of humble beginnings. This brings us to University of Finland student Linus Torvalds, 1991. He was originally inspired by the Minix (miniature LINUX) operating system. The first official version of Linux, version 0.0.2, was released on October 5, 1991. After many very unstable versions, the first version claiming to be stable, version 1.0 was released.
Today, Linux has evolved into a full-blown operating system that, in many ways, rivals commercial systems. With the amount of interest it has garnered, Linux has now become an actively developing and improving system. While many programmers do contribute to the development of Linux, kernel features are still controlled by Linus Torvalds (Sumit, 2001)....
