History of Linux
by Ragib Hasana. In The Beginning
b. New Baby in the horizon
c. Confrontation and development
d. Some Linux Cookies
e. Acknowledgments
It was 1991, and the ruthless agonies of the cold war was gradually coming to an end. There was an air of peace and tranquility that prevailed in the horizon. In the field of computing, a great future seemed to be in the offing, as powerful hardware pushed the limits of the computers beyond what anyone expected.
But still, something was missing.
And it was the none other than the Operating Systems, where a great void seemed to have appeared.
For one thing, DOS was still reigning supreme in its vast empire of personal computers. Bought by Bill Gates from a Seattle hacker for $50,000, the bare bones operating system had sneaked into every corner of the world by virtue of a clever marketing strategy. PC users had no other choice. Apple Macs were better, but with astronomical prices that nobody could afford, they remained a horizon away from the eager millions.
The other dedicated camp of computing was the Unix world. But Unix itself was far more expensive. In quest of big money, the Unix vendors priced it high enough to ensure small pc users stayed away from it. The source code of Unix, once taught in 1universities courtesy of Bell Labs, was now cautiously and not published publicly. To add to the frustration of PC users worldwide, the big players in the software market failed to provide an efficient solution to this problem.
A solution seemed to appear in form of MINIX. It was written from scratch by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a dutch professor who wanted to teach his students the inner workings of a real operating system. It was designed to run on the Intel 8086 microprocessors that had flooded the world market.
As an operating system, MINIX was not a superb one. But it had the advantage that the source code was available. Anyone who happened to get the book 'Operating System' by Tanenbaum could get hold of the 12,000 lines of code, written in C and assembly language. For the first time, an aspiring programmer or hacker could read the source codes of the operating system, which to that time the software vendors had guarded vigorously. Students of Computer Science all over the world poured over the book, reading through the codes to understand the very system that runs their computer.
And one of them was Linus Torvalds.
In 1991, Linus Benedict Torvalds was a second year student of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki and a self-taught hacker. The 21 year old sandy haired soft-spoken Finn loved to tinker with the power of the computers and the limits to which the system can be pushed. But all that was lacking was an operating system that could meet the demands of the professionals. MINIX was good, but still it was simply an operating system for the students, designed as a teaching tool rather than an industry strength one.
At that time, programmers worldwide were greatly inspired by the GNU project by Richard Stallman, a software movement to provide free and quality software. The much awaited Gnu C compiler was available by then, but there was still no operating system. Even MINIX had to be licensed. Work was going the GNU kernel HURD, but that was not supposed to come out within a few years.
That was too much of a delay for Linus.
In August 25, 1991 the historic post was sent to the MINIX news group by Linus .....
From:
torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict
Torvalds)
Newsgroups:
comp.os.minix
Subject:
What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary:
small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID:
<1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25
Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello
everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a
(free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big
and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been
brewing
; since april, and is starting
to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things
people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it
somewhat
(same
physical layout of the file-system (due to practical
reasons)
among other
things). I've currently ported bash(1.08) and
gcc(1.40),and
things seem to work.This implies that
I'll get something practical within a
few months,
andI'd like to know what features most people would want.
Any
suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them
:-)
Linus
(torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes -
it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded
fs.
It is NOT
protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably
never
will
support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's
all I have
:-(.
As it is apparent from the posting, Linus himself didn't believe that his creation was going to be big enough to change computing forever. Linux version 0.01 was released by mid september 1991, and was put on the net. Enthusiasm gathered around this new kid on the block, and codes were downloaded, tested, tweaked, and returned to Linus. 0.02 came on October 5th, along with this famous declaration from Linus:
From:
torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict
Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject:
Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
Message-ID:
<1991Oct5.054106.4647@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 5
Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
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-lookalike 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 (+1 (very
small)
patch already), but I've successfully run
bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it.
Sources
for this pet project of mine can be found at nic.funet.fi
(128.214.6.100) in the directory /pub/OS/Linux.
The
directory also contains some README-file and a couple of binaries
to work under linux
(bash,
update and gcc, what more can you ask for :-). Full kernel source
is provided, as no minix code has been
used.
Library sources are only partially free, so that cannot be
distributed currently. The system is able to
compile
"as-is"
and has been known to work. Heh. Sources to the binaries (bash
and gcc) can be found at the
same place
in /pub/gnu.
Linux version 0.03 came in a few weeks. By December came version
0.10. Still Linux was little more than in skeletal form. It had
only support for AT hard disks, had no login ( booted directly to
bash). version 0.11 was much better with support for multilingual
keyboards, floppy disk drivers, support for VGA,EGA, Hercules
etc. The version numbers went directly from 0.12 to 0.95 and 0.96
and so on. Soon the code went worldwide via ftp sites at Finland
and elsewhere.
c. Confrontation & Development
Soon Linus faced some confrontation from none other than Andrew Tanenbaum, the great teacher who wrote MINIX. In a post to Linus, Tanenbaum commented:
" I still maintain the
point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental
error. Be thankful you are not my
student. You would
not get a high grade for such a design :-)"
(Andrew Tanenbaum to
Linus Torvalds)
Linus later admitted that it was the worst point of his
development of Linux. Tanenbaum was certainly the famous
professor, and anything he said certainly mattered. But he was
wrong with Linux, for Linus was one stubborn guy who won't admit
defeat.
Tanenbaum also remarked that : "Linux is obsolete".
Now was the turn for the new Linux generation. Backed by the strong Linux community, Linus gave a reply to Tanenbaum which seems to be most fitting:
Your job is being a
professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good
excuse
for some of the
brain-damages of minix.
(Linus Torvalds to
Andrew Tanenbaum)
And work went on. Soon more than a hundred people joined the Linux camp. Then thousands. Then hundreds of thousands. This was no longer a hackers toy. Powered by a plethora of programs from the GNU project, Linux was ready for the actual showdown. It was licensed under GNU General Public License, thus ensuring that the source codes will be free for all to copy, study and to change. Students and computer programmers grabbed it.
Soon, commercial vendors moved in. Linux itself was, and is free. What the vendors did was to compile up various software and gather them in a distributable format, more like the other operating systems with which people were more familiar. Red Hat , Caldera, Debian, and some other companies gained substantial amount of response from the users worldwide. With the new Graphical User Interfaces (like X-windows, KDE) the Linux distributions became very popular.
Meanwhile, there were amazing things happening with Linux.
Engineers have tweaked Linux to run 3Com's handheld PalmPilot
computer. Red Hat Software's version of Linux won the 1996 award
for bestdesktop computer operating system from trade
magazine InfoWorld. In April that year researchers at Los Alamos
National Laboratory used Linux to run 68 PCs as a single parallel
processing machine to simulate atomic shock waves.The
do-it-yourself supercomputer cost only $152,000, including labor
(connecting the 68 PCs with cables)-about one tenth the price of
a comparable commercial machine. It reached a peak speed of 19
billion calculations per second, making it the 315th most
powerful supercomputer in the world. Three months later it still
didn't have to be rebooted.
As for Linus, he remains a simple man. Unlike Bill Gates, he is not a billionaire. Having completed studies, he moved to USA and landed a job at Transmeta Corporation. Recently married, he is the proud father of a girl, Patricia Miranda Torvalds. But he remains as the world's most favorite and most famous programmer to this date. Revered by Computer communities worldwide, Linus is by far the most popular programmer on this planet. He deserves it.
Epilogue 2000
The year 2000 started as the beginning of a new century, and of
course, a brand new millenium. With the ever increasing
popularity of Linux sky-rocketing to new heights, it was clear
that Linux was to stay as an inevitable part of computing in the
3rd Millenium. And the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds also
created headlines when his company Transmeta Corporation
delivered the ultimate result of their secret product, the
amazing Crusoe(TM) processor. Linus worked from the beginning as
a project member, and the resultant Crusoe processor is another
testimony to his remarkable abilities as a dreamer. One thing is
clear, The Future Belongs To Linux!
Here are some famous words by Linus himself.
Dijkstra probably hates me
(Linus Torvalds, in kernel/sched.c)
"How should I know if it works? That's what
beta testers are for. I only
coded it."
(Attributed to Linus Torvalds, somewhere in a
posting)
"I'm an idiot.. At least this one [bug] took
about 5 minutes to find.."
(Linus Torvalds in response to a bug
report.)
"If you want to travel around the world and be
invited to speak at a lot
of different places, just write a Unix operating
system."
(By Linus Torvalds)
> > Other than the fact Linux has a cool
name, could someone explain why I
> > should use Linux over BSD?
>
> No. That's it. The cool name, that is.
We worked very hard on
> creating a name that would appeal to the
majority of people, and it
> certainly paid off: thousands of people are
using linux just to be able
> to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a
cool name". 386BSD made the
> mistake of putting a lot of numbers and
weird abbreviations into the
> name, and is scaring away a lot of people
just because it sounds too
> technical.
(Linus Torvalds' follow-up to a question about
Linux)
> The day people think linux would be better
served by somebody else (FSF
> being the natural alternative), I'll
"abdicate". I don't think that
> it's something people have to worry about
right now - I don't see it
> happening in the near future. I enjoy
doing linux, even though it does
> mean some work, and I haven't gotten any
complaints (some almost timid
> reminders about a patch I have forgotten or
ignored, but nothing
> negative so far).
>
> Don't take the above to mean that I'll stop
the day somebody complains:
> I'm thick-skinned (Lasu, who is reading
this over my shoulder commented
> that "thick-HEADED is closer to the truth")
enough to take some abuse.
> If I weren't, I'd have stopped developing
linux the day ast ridiculed me
> on c.o.minix. What I mean is just that
while linux has been my baby so
> far, I don't want to stand in the way if
people want to make something
> better of it (*).
>
> Linus
>
> (*) Hey, maybe I could apply for a
saint-hood from the Pope. Does
> somebody know what his email-address is?
I'm so nice it makes you puke.
(Taken from Linus's reply to someone worried
about the future of Linux)
`When you say "I wrote a program that crashed
Windows", people just stare at
you blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the
system, *for free*".'
(By Linus Torvalds)
Your job is being a professor and researcher:
That's one hell of a good excuse
for some of the brain-damages of minix.
(Linus Torvalds to Andrew Tanenbaum)
All materials taken from various sources belong to their respective authors. All trademarks belong to the respective corporations and companies. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft corp.
The author fully reserve the right to the portions of this article written solely by himself, under Gnu GPL. However all are requested to distribute this article freely and vigorosly. ( If this legal things bore you, don't blame me. Who knows, Microsoft lawyers might find a way to sue for their Logo or name... :) ).
For all mistakes and
suggestions
Contact me:
Ragib Hasan,
Department of Computer Science &
Engineering,
Bangladesh University of Engineering &
Technology,
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
mail me at ragibhasan@yahoo.com
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Last Updated: Nov 4, 2000