Linux originated in 1991 as a personal project of Linus Torvalds, a Finnish graduate
student. He originally conceived the project as a modest offshoot of Minix, a model
operating system written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. However, Linux generated substantial
interest in the world at large, and the kernel soon took on a life of its own. By
exploiting the power of cooperative development, Linus was able to tackle a much
more ambitious agenda. Kernel version 1.0 was released in 1994; as of this writing
(September 2006), the most recent stable version of the Linux kernel is 2.6.17.
Because Linux owes much to its UNIX ancestors, it’s not quite fair to locate the dawn
of the Linux era in 1991. The history of UNIX goes back several decades to 1969,
when UNIX originated as a research project at AT&T Bell Labs. In 1976, UNIX was
made available at no charge to universities and thus became the basis of many operating
systems classes and academic research projects.
Berkeley UNIX began in 1977 when the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG)
at the University of California, Berkeley, licensed code from AT&T. Berkeley’s releases
1. A “production” environment is one that an organization relies on to accomplish real work (as opposed
to testing, research, or development).
6 Chapter 1 – Where to Start
(called BSD, for Berkeley Software Distribution) started with 1BSD for the PDP-11
and culminated in 1993 with 4.4BSD.
As UNIX gained commercial acceptance, the price of source licenses rose rapidly.
Eventually, Berkeley set the long-term goal of removing AT&T’s code from BSD, a
tedious and time-consuming process. Before the work could be completed, Berkeley
lost funding for operating systems research and the CSRG was disbanded.
Before disbanding, the CSRG released its final collection of AT&T-free code, known
as 4.4BSD-Lite. Most current versions of BSD UNIX (including FreeBSD, NetBSD,
Mac OS X,2 and OpenBSD) claim the 4.4BSD-Lite package as their grandparent.
Most other major versions of UNIX (including HP-UX and Solaris) are descendants
of the original AT&T lineage. Linux doesn’t share code with the AT&T or BSD flavors
of UNIX, but from a functional perspective it falls somewhere between the two.
student. He originally conceived the project as a modest offshoot of Minix, a model
operating system written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. However, Linux generated substantial
interest in the world at large, and the kernel soon took on a life of its own. By
exploiting the power of cooperative development, Linus was able to tackle a much
more ambitious agenda. Kernel version 1.0 was released in 1994; as of this writing
(September 2006), the most recent stable version of the Linux kernel is 2.6.17.
Because Linux owes much to its UNIX ancestors, it’s not quite fair to locate the dawn
of the Linux era in 1991. The history of UNIX goes back several decades to 1969,
when UNIX originated as a research project at AT&T Bell Labs. In 1976, UNIX was
made available at no charge to universities and thus became the basis of many operating
systems classes and academic research projects.
Berkeley UNIX began in 1977 when the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG)
at the University of California, Berkeley, licensed code from AT&T. Berkeley’s releases
1. A “production” environment is one that an organization relies on to accomplish real work (as opposed
to testing, research, or development).
6 Chapter 1 – Where to Start
(called BSD, for Berkeley Software Distribution) started with 1BSD for the PDP-11
and culminated in 1993 with 4.4BSD.
As UNIX gained commercial acceptance, the price of source licenses rose rapidly.
Eventually, Berkeley set the long-term goal of removing AT&T’s code from BSD, a
tedious and time-consuming process. Before the work could be completed, Berkeley
lost funding for operating systems research and the CSRG was disbanded.
Before disbanding, the CSRG released its final collection of AT&T-free code, known
as 4.4BSD-Lite. Most current versions of BSD UNIX (including FreeBSD, NetBSD,
Mac OS X,2 and OpenBSD) claim the 4.4BSD-Lite package as their grandparent.
Most other major versions of UNIX (including HP-UX and Solaris) are descendants
of the original AT&T lineage. Linux doesn’t share code with the AT&T or BSD flavors
of UNIX, but from a functional perspective it falls somewhere between the two.
0 Comments
Post a Comment