Linux 20 years and on
Although some of us are not familiar with the Linux OS (operating system), it is out there and we are using it whether we realise it or not. When we use the internet to browse or check emails we are using Linux servers hosting most of the websites and also at the ISPs end; some ATMs and of course the latest craze -- Android based smartphones and tablets are also Linux powered.On August 25, 2011 Linux crossed the 20 year milestone. Linus Torvalds first created Linux as only a hobby in 1991 when he was 20 and was studying computer science at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
When Linus was in third year of his graduation, he bought an Intel 80386-based PC. He spent a month playing Prince of Persia and waited for his copy of Minix (an Unix-like computer OS based on a microkernel architecture) to arrive. Minix was free for educational use, but its licence did not allow modifying and it was only 16-bit OS, which did not match well with the 32-bit 386 processor.
Linux had to wait few more months to come to life. At first, it started as a terminal emulator, which Torvalds used to access his university's Unix system. It was built under Minix using the GNU C Compiler (GCC), which Stallman & Co. released a few years back.
But before knowing it, he had written a complete operating system kernel for his 386 PC, and drafted the following email to the Minix mailing list on August 25, 1991:
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…
By then he had already ported Bash and GCC to his new OS, and was taking feature requests. But the newborn OS did not have a name. Linus wanted to call it Freax- a portmanteau of freak, free, and “x” of the Unix, but later, when the codebase was moved to a FUNET FTP server, Linus' coworker (and the FTP admin) Ari Lemmke named the directory “linux” as he did not like “Freax”.
Linus first released the kernel under his own, non-commercial licence, but by December 1992 it was released under the full GNU GPL licence and the first Linux distributions (Debian, Slackware, and others) started to appear.
Linux soon grow into the first truly successful open source project.
Tux, the mascot of Linux, came much later in 1996. The OS by then gained ability to perform multi-processor symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), a feature that made Linux a viable option for enterprises and supercomputers right away. Companies like IBM and Oracle soon started showing their support to it.
By the beginning of the 21st century Linux became unstoppable and combined with Apache it became a key component of the DotCom Boom.
Seventy-five per cent of stock exchanges worldwide now run Linux as well as the servers that power Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, eBay and Google and many more web servers (50 to 80 per cent).
With 95 per cent, Linux now dominates the supercomputing world. And with Ubuntu's popularity, it is coming to more desktops than ever before. Most of the ATMs around the world are also run by Linux.
Linux is also the kernel behind Android, which puts it in the heart of mobile world. Linux also powers most wireless routers and DVD players.
The way Linux has been growing it would not be overstating to say that Linux is becoming an indispensable part of our life.