Scribd
Upload
5 views

Module_1a_Linux Overview

Uploaded by

juliopetronilo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
5 views

Module_1a_Linux Overview

Uploaded by

juliopetronilo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

INFO-3182- Operating systems - Linux

Module 1a Brief History of Linux


Introduction

This document introduces the Linux operating system and its origins.

Before Linux

In the 1960s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs and General Electric started a
project to create a new main frame operating system named Multics (Multiplexed Information and
Computer Services). This project was cancelled prior to completion, but the concepts it introduced were
not lost or forgotten.

A new project was started at AT&T Bell Labs that built on the work started by the Multics project but
targeted at the smaller Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10 system and later the PDP-11 . This
new project was called Unics (UNiplexed Information and Computing Service). Unics was later changed
to Unix. The operating system was originally written in assembly language and them completely
rewritten in C in 1972. The two key developers of Unics (and Unix) were Ken Thomson and Dennis
Ritchie along with numerous others. Unix was only available from AT&T Bell Labs until the late 1970s
when they started licensing it to other organizations. Some well-known Unix variants are BSD (University
of California, Berkley), HP-UX (HP/HPE), and AIX (IBM). BSD is still under active development today, but
most other Unix variants are gradually disappearing.

AT&T Bell Labs sold the Unix rights to Novell in the early 1990s. Novell then sold the rights to The Open
Group in 1996.

A core design philosophy of the Unix operating system is modularity. This means that Unix consists of a
set of small tools that do simple, well-defined operations. Unix started as a small set of software but
rapidly grew as other organizations, especially academic institutions started using it.

Unix was not originally designed as a portable, multi-user, multi-tasking operating system. It was
intended for use by software developers. The software created on it could be run on Unix and other
systems. Multi-tasking and multi-user support was added after the operating system became popular as
was support for other hardware platforms.

Page 1 of 3
INFO-3182- Operating systems - Linux

Introducing Linux

The Linux kernel was introduced in 1991 by the Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds. It is a Unix-like
kernel and basic set of supporting tools created from scratch to include the best features of several Unix
variants. The original Linux kernel was mostly written in the C programming language and continues to
use C today. Torvalds is still actively involved in the Linux kernel development team.

Linux officially refers to the kernel and this small set of tools. The word Linux is commonly used to refer
to any operating system distribution that uses the Linux kernel, although the name of the distribution
should be used. This course looks at the CentOS Stream 9 and Ubuntu 24.04 distributions.

There have been hundreds of Linux distributions since 1991. Some of them are still under active
development and others have disappeared. The diagram in Figure 1 shows part of the evolution of Linux
and other Unix-like operating systems.

Figure 1 Tree diagram of some of the evolution of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

Page 2 of 3
INFO-3182- Operating systems - Linux

GNU and FSF

The GNU project was started by Richard Stallman in 1983 to create and distribute free, open-source
software, including operating systems. This project is still active today as part of the broader-scoped
Free Software Foundation (FSF) which was formed in 1986.

Initially, the GNU Project adopted the TRIX operating system developed at MIT as the target for all its
software, but later switched to Linux after it was released. This is why the official name for Linux is
GNU/Linux.

Today the GNU Project has many software packages available for Linux and other operating systems.
One of these is the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) which includes compilers for the C, C++, Fortran, Ada,
and other programming languages. The Linux kernel is compiled using the C compiler in GCC.

Page 3 of 3

You might also like