The History of Linux: Time Machine from 1991
Linux is going to turn 25 years old on August 25. It is the day when Linus Torvalds sent out his fateful message asking for help with a new operating system. Let's see what his message was “I’m doing an operating system for 386 AT clones. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat,”. He wrote all of these in the comp.os.minix message board. Rest of the messages had become history.
After sitting in front of the latest version of Ubuntu, Fedora or SUSE and enjoying the glorious animated desktops, ease-of-use the GUI grants, do we ever wondered how our favorite operating system came to your computer?
Do you want to know about the amount of time and effort that took to make this OS better and better? If you do, then we will help you with this post.
So if you want to read about the history of the wonderful OS and its journey, you have to take some time to read the complete post. You may have curiosity on when was it born? How did it evolve? and more. We will help you to fulfill your thirst about all these. Let's start the time machine now.
Getting back to 1991
The humble beginnings…
At the very first, there was something called Unix. And Unix was created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, in 1969. It was paused till the time of the eighties. But after that, some more projects began and they were based on the Unix.
Some of those projects were Richard Stallman's GNU Project, the Berkley Software Distribution (BSD), the book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Professor Andrew S Tanenbaum, and MINIX (Mini-Unix).
In 1991, a young Finnish student called Linus Torvalds wished that he want to make a storm in the world. And he decided to use the knowledge what he learnt from landmark systems.
There are many people who helped Linux to get developed. One of them is Linus. He transferred data to his hard drive instead of his modem and wiped out the MINIX partitions he had created. He was frustrated because of the limits of OS. So he wanted to create one for his own.
But people says the real story behind creating Linux is, he created a free terminal emulator basing on MINIX, but it was based on Unix and become the workings for an operating system kernel. And on 25 August 1991, Linus sent his famous message to MINIX Newsgroup.
With that, FTP servers of the world started to talk about the versions of Linux (It was originally named Freax). And it helped to increase contributor numbers.
It's time to finish 1991. We cannot stay here. Let's move to another year.
The time of 1992 to 1994
How the desktop founders grew up!
Nothing much happened between 1992 and 1994. But in these times, some more founders of the modern Linux desktop appeared. Slackware, Red Hat, and Debian, with Linux kernel growing to become 0.95.
Slackware had the first systems to adopt the Linux kernel in that time. And Slackware started life as SLS. If you define SLS, it will come to Softlanding Linux System. And it was founded by Peter MacDonald in 1992.
But this version of Linux still had some frustrations because of its buggy interface. So someone named Ian Murdock was the fourth to release another version of Linux which was called The Debian Linux Release. And Debian Linux came from his girl friend's name.
And One that appeared in 1994, is S.U.S.E Linux.
After that, another version saw the light of the sun on 3 November 1994. And it was called Red Hat Commercial Linux. The great creator of it was Marc Ewing. The name of this version came from the coloured hat he wore whilst at University. Yes, It seems some funny.
On 14 March 1994, something wonderful happened. Linux 1.0.0 was launched with 176,250 lines of code for the first time. Many years are left yet. So let's move.
More four years - 1995 to 1999
Beginning of Gnome and KDE
In these years, you will be able to see some of the greatest Linux distributions and incidents. It starts from the 'big three', with some very notable off-shoots of the Linux family, and the penguin attack of 1996.
Jurix Linux is another version of Linus, and it was pretty interesting for a few things. It was the first version to include a scriptable installer. It also allowed an admin install. And admin install was used to copy the installation process with similar machines. It was also one of the first Linux systems to use EXT2.
The Red Hat-based branch of Linux OSs was a fertile bunch. Because during that time, some more versions were released named as Caldera, Mandrake, TurboLinux, Yellow Dog, and Red Flag. All of these began life from the evolving with Linux kernel. And from 1995 to 1999, in versions 1.2.0 to 2.2.
Version 2.0 was launched in 1996. And there were 41 releases in the series. We saw something like 41 releases in the series. Version 2.0 had some features like SMP support and better memory management. It could run on more types of processor.
Let's talk about the matter of penguin. It was a holiday and Linus visited a zoo in Australia. But in there, he was bitten by a ferocious penguin. And then he got infected with penguinitis. It forced him to stay awake at night and thinking about penguins. He became very fond of them. It's hard to believe. But we are not talking this from our own. Linus told all these.
Whatever, the main thing is Linus loved penguins. As his comment, Penguins are goofy and funny.
Debian-based systems began to grow. They started to be more user-friendly. Those were also desktop-orientated. So often popular magazines of that time printed about Debian-based distros in their front page.
The most noticeable subject in these five years was the birth of KDE and Gnome. KDE means Kool Desktop Environment. And it was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich. He was a student of the University of Tübingen.
In 1998, KDE version 1.0 released and it was open to the world. The first distro to use KDE was Mandrake. And in 2000, version 2.0 was out and featured a greatly improved system. It leads them to more popularity. Version 2.0 was with Konqueror, KOffice, and KIO networking.
Some new members named Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena announced a new desktop environment and accompanying applications, based on GTK+. This was called Gnome. Gnome became an acceptable desktop environment. It was quick, malleable and very friendly for most of the users. In May 2000, Gnome 1.2 Bongo was released.
Oracle and Sun supported Linux versions officially. So the OS became increasingly popular. And as a result, more system admins started to use the penguin versions it in their server rooms.
2000 to 2005: Time for distros to come live.
These were some glorious time for Linux team.
Knoppix was a Debian-based distro. It was developed by Klaus Knopper. This became popular. The main feature of this was it could boot directly from a CD. Knoppix 1.4 was released on 30 September 2000 with some more extra features.
Knoppix was followable. So some of the Knoppix-based distros are still with us.
Linux From Scratch (LFS) was conceived with a book by Gerard Beekmans. It helped users through instructing them on building their Linux system from source.
To ensure the protection of Linux and making the advancements, Linux Foundation was started in 2000. Their work was to sponsor the work of Linus and the community who helps to make Linux more.
This split the team in two. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 was released with kernel 2.4.9. This version had more stability and long-term support for the enterprise user.
December 2002, the world saw the release of another distro called CRUX. Their main thing was 'keep it simple' theme. And it became popular in that time.
The time came when Linux distros were starting to grow very fast. Users were using CRUX in replacement of Windows. Because CRUX looks smarter than Windows. When kernel 2.4 was doing well, version 2.6 was released on 18 December. It came with some support for PAE, new CPUs, improved 64-bit support, 16TB filesystem sizes, EXT4 and more.
As the Linux distro was gaining more and more users. But there was still a distance from those users who preferred the flavourings of Microsoft. So there was need of something that would make Linux more human, and show more humanity. That means Ubuntu was required.
It was based on Debian. And Ubuntu's aim was to create an easy desktop to give best user experiences. Ubuntu 4.10, the Warty Warthog was released on 20 October 2004. And the dream came true.
2006 to NOW
Situation of Ubuntu
So now, we are at present.
Many different distros were released from 2006. One has become the fourth most-used operating system in the world. And also the most popular distro.
Linux Mint 1.0, Ada was released in 2006. It was with a heady mixture of FOSS and proprietary software. It is one of the bests.
KDE4 was released. Linus himself state that KDE 4.0 was a "break everything" and "halfbaked" release. But it had the Plasma desktop, and the cutting-edge look and feel. Users loved that. KDE 4.2 was released in 2009.
23 September, the world saw the opening of the new Linux. It's Android. Yes, most of Android users don't know that they are using a Linux based system.
Ubuntu arrived at the top of the Linux charts. It had many users because of it's easy to use environment. But at the 14th release, it came with Unity. Users hated that and still hate. Ubuntu fell from their favour and struggling to keep up.
Happy Birthday, Linux!
So, the time machine stops here. Because we already reached to the present day. Yes, till now we've seen many Linux distros. Do you want to wish 25th Birthday to Linux? Wish that with your style. But don't forget to share the post. Share this post with your friends and let everyone know about the history of Linux and celebrate the birthday with knowing about the OS. Thanks for coming to the end.
Thanks for doing this. An old techy here, ran SCO Unix when it was new.
ReplyDeleteGreat article :D
ReplyDeleteOh I still remember the floppy disc :)
ReplyDelete