Origin of Linux

Richard Matthew Stallman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

UNIX is created by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas Mcllory and  Joe Ossanna in the year 1969 at AT&T Bell labs USA. The first official release of UNIX is made two year later in 1971 which is coded in assembly language. Later in 1973 Dennis Ritchie has rewritten the whole software in his own C language. From then UNIX has been emerged as most popular Operating system. AT&T started selling this software as proprietary product. Meantime Andrew S. Tanenbaum designed minimal version of UNIX for educational purpose and named MINIX.

A decade later in 1983, Richard Stallman started his new project which aimed in creating Unix-like software. It is named HURD. Richard Stallman started sharing his worke under GNU License. GNU license allows users to view source code and modify them provided it should not be redistributed commercially.  This is origin for Open Source software.

Linus Torvald (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Before HURD is complete, Linux Torvalds in 1991 developed a complete Unix-like kernel called Linux. Inspired of the concept of GNU, Linux Torvalds started releasing his product under GNU License. GNU components were developed by developers all over the world to make a fully functional and free operating system. Now Linux is more promising operating system for servers. Top 10 super computers in the world runs in Linux.

Ken Thompson (left) and Dennis Ritchie (right) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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