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System History
It has all started from MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing
Service) operating system. It was a joint project of Bell Telephone Labs
(AT&T Division), General Electrics and MIT.
In year 1969, AT&T decided to withdraw from the project. The system
itself was rather good, but it wasn't popular. The most important fact,
however, was that it was a true multiuser system - it meant that a computer
machine could be running calculations and/or programs for more than 1
user at a time. And it was a catchy slogan back in the 60's/70's.
Of course, the experience AT&T staff got while working on the MULTICS
project was invaluable. One of such people was Ken Thompson. He wrote
an advanced astronomical program and he wanted it to run nearly continously.
He worked on a MULTICS machine named GE-645. His superiors at BTL weren't
happy since they needed the machine to run different programs.
Thompson met Dennis Ritchie, who eventually found a PDP-7 class machine
somewhere. It wasn't needed anywhere, so they had a machine. What sucked,
was that it had no software at all - so they needed to write an operating
system for the 'puter so it could run the Space Travel program.
And in summer 1969, in Bell Telephone Labs, it was born. The UNIX system.
We don't know why it was named that way, probably in a tribute to MULTICS.
The first thing those guys did was the system kernel, which supported
single-user operations. It was written in assembler. Then, in few more
days, Thopmson, Ritchie and their new mate, Rudd Canaday, implemented
a multi-user and multi-task filesystem. However, they needed a more powerful
machine to continue. And BTL directors weren't willing to spend money
on a new machine, which wasn't neccessary for use in a telephone company.
Joe Osanna, another MULTICS engineer, suggested that a PDP-11/20 could
be perfect for word processing purposes. And it worked!
They got a PDP-11/20 in summer 1970 and from this point, they worked on
both the word processor and the system. Everything wen't perfect and the
brass soon got what they were promised. A text processor. In addition,
the system was rewritten to use some new tricks and named the second release.
At this point, the programmers wanted to summarize their UNIX knowledge
and wrote the UNIX Programmer's Manual, the first full system documentation
released. It appeared in November 1971 and the authors were Dennis and
Ritchie. Next release wa dated July 1972.
The new system appeared stable and efficient and more installations began
to appear. Also, there were new computers on the market: PDP-11/34, PDP-11/40,
PDP-11/45 and PDP-11/70. Again, to utilise the new functions, the authors
released the third version. It was written in C. It allowed them to quickly
modify and port the code where they wanted it. C, written by Brian Kernighan,
was designed specially for system programming.
The milestone was the decision made by AT&T directors and their lawyers
- to make the system free for educational and private, non-commercial
purposes. This triggered new and new installations, lots of other, sometimes
commercial versions and the expansion, that still is visible.
Since then, UNIX systems grew everywhere. I'll skip the specific versions,
each of those systems is very alike. One of those versions gets more and
more popular - that is Linux. Linux was created by a finnish student,
Linus Torvalds (yes, the man who is a director in Transmeta Corp). A while
ago, back in 1991, he was playing with various programs on a i80386 processor
family, because he wanted to check out the new x86 family member. The
programs were run inside a MINIX system - a typical educational version
of Linux. Torvalds soon made himself comfortable with the processor and
he decided that he could make his own operating system which could use
80386 instructions. He wrote the system kernel, a keyboard driver and
a task-switching daemon. The LINUX was born.
It was September 1991 and the system was more like a hobby for Linus.
Only few people noticed the "New MINIX" and they pointed out some minuses:
no UNIX commands, no C compiler... when Linus added those, he was quite
sure it is in vain. But he implemented few new functions.
The kick was the portability Linus assured. And the fact that the code
was made public - and mostly free. Portability between commercial UNIX
systems and LINUX ones. Soon, the system became known. However, like before,
minuses were again pointed out. This time, thousands of people around
the world worked late nights to make it better - and they made it real.
The system was bit unstable and people had to wait till March 1994 for
the version 1.0 - the first final to be released. Since then, there are
thousands of LINUX versions all around the world and Torvalds is known
as a true PC guru. And the LINUX is known for its great stability, open
source, variety of functions, really strong possibilities, very hard configuration
and very small requirements. Of course, there are some versions for SPARC
Alpha and other processor families, but x86 versions work better most
of the cases.
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