The History of Linux Essay - 955 Words

It all began in 1991, during the time of monumental computing development. DOS had been bought from a Seattle hacker by Bill Gates, for a sum of $50,000 – a small price for an operating system that had managed sneak its way across the globe due to a clever marketing strategy. Apple’s OS and UNIX were both available, though the cost of running either was far greater than that of running DOS. Enter MINIX, an operating system developed from the ground up by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a college professor. MINIX was part of a lesson plan used to teach students the inner-workings of an operating system. Tanenbaum had written a book on MINIX called â€Å"Operating System† and anyone who had picked up a copy would find the 12,000 lines of code that†¦show more content†¦He used resources made available through the GNU project (known as GNU’s Not Linux), which was a developmental stage of a UNIX-type operating system that was open source. He kept the file system structure, and ported bash(1.08) as well as gcc(1.40), for â€Å"practical reasons†. Once a small compilation was complete he released it on the web labeling it simply as â€Å"0.01† and asked for testing from MINIX users. A few months later after receiving numerous tweaks from other users, Linus released â€Å"0.02† in the month of October. A few weeks later after even more testing version â€Å"0.03† was released and by December of that year â€Å"0.10† was released. With the advent of â€Å"0.11† more support for device drivers had been made available (e.g. Multilingual Keyboards / VGA). Today version numbers reach up towards â€Å"0.95† and â€Å"0.96†, due to the fact that code has been made readily available to the public for tweaking, much as it was in its early stages. Now that development was out of the way (to an extent), it was then on Linus to distribute. Confrontation arose when months after his OS had been distributed; Linus received an email from Tanenbaum, quoting quot;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 :-)quot;. Linus had later admitted that this was not one ofShow MoreRelatedThe History of Gnu/Linux Essay1047 Words   |  5 Pagesformerly existed within the walls of their previous location of employment. GNU/Linux, as an operating system and massive community programming project, quickly became the flagship for the open source revolution and the claim to fame for two exceptional hackers, Richard Stallman and Linus Benedict Torvalds, the two most highly respected and well-known hackers that have ever lived.. 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