Happy 29th anniversary "Linux"

August 25, 1991, after five months of development a student named "Linus Torvalds" who at that time was 21 years old made it known that he was building a working prototype of a new operating system, for which the migration of bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40 had been completed.

It took several days for the first public version of the kernel to be released Linux that was released on September 17. The 0.0.1 kernel was compressed to 62 KB and contained around 10 thousand lines of source code (whereas the current kernel has more than 28 million lines of code).

The Linux kernel was inspired by the MINIX operating system, which Linus didn't like with his limited license. Later, when Linux became a famous project, the naysayers they tried to accuse Linus of directly copying the code of some MINIX subsystems.

The attack was repelled by the author of MINIX, Andrew Tanenbaum, who commissioned a student to do a detailed comparison of the Minix code with the first public versions of Linux. Study results showed the presence of only four negligible code block matches due to POSIX and ANSI C requirements.

Linus originally thought of calling the kernel "Freax" free, freak and X (Unix), but the kernel was named "Linux" with the light hand of Ari Lemmke, who, at the request of Linus, put the kernel on the university's FTP server, naming the directory with the file not "freax", as Torvalds requested, but "linux".

Notably, William Della Croce (an entrepreneur) managed to register the Linux trademark and wanted to collect royalties over time, but then changed his mind and transferred all the rights to the trademark to Linus.

The official mascot for the Linux kernel, the Tux penguin, was selected through a competition held in 1996. The name Tux stands for Torvalds UniX.

Regarding the history of the kernelThese are the most important versions throughout the history of Linux:

  • As of September 1991 - Linux 0.0.1: It is the first public version that only supports i386 CPU and boots from floppy disk
  • As of January 1992 - Linux 0.12: the code began to be distributed under the GPLv2 license;
  • As of March 1992 - Linux 0.95- Provided the ability to run the X Window System, support for virtual memory, and partition swapping.
    Linux 0.96-0.99 - 1992-1993: work started on the network stack. The Ext2 file system was introduced, support for the ELF file format was added, drivers for sound cards and SCSI controllers were introduced.
    In 1992 the first SLS and Yggdrasil distributions appeared. In the summer of 1993, the Slackware and Debian projects were founded.
  • As of March 1994 - Linux 1.0: is the first officially stable version.
  • As of March 1995 - Linux 1.2: has significant increase in the number of drivers, support for Alpha, MIPS and SPARC platforms, expansion of network stack capabilities, appearance of a packet filter, support for NFS.
  • June 1996 - Linux 2.0- Arrives with support for multiprocessor systems.
  • In March 1997: Foundation of LKML, the Linux kernel developers mailing list.
  • In 1998,: Launch of the first Linux cluster based on Top500, consisting of 68 nodes with Alpha CPUs.
  • As of January 1999 - Linux 2.2: already has a higher efficiency memory management system, added support for IPv6, implemented a new firewall, introduced a new sound subsystem;
  • As of February 2001 - Linux 2.6- Support for 8-processor 64GB RAM systems, Ext3 file system, USB, ACPI support.
  • As of December 2003 - Linux 2.6: comes with SELinux support, automatic kernel tuning tools, sysfs, revised memory management system;
  • In 2005, the Xen hypervisor was introduced, ushering in the era of virtualization.
  • In September 2008, the first version of the Android platform based on the Linux kernel was formed.
  • July 2011 - end of branch 2.6.x: After 10 years of development of the 2.6.x branch, the transition to the 3.x numbering was made. The number of objects in the Git repository has reached 2 million.
  • In 2015 - Linux 4.0- was released, the number of git objects in the repository has reached 4 million.
  • As of January 2019 - Linux 5.0: The repository has reached the level of 6,5 million git objects.
  • In August 2020 - Linux 5.8: It was the largest in terms of the number of changes of all kernels during the entire existence of the project.

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  1.   Jose Luis Villaverde placeholder image said

    Linux is not an operating system, it is the kernel used by the GNU operating system created by Richard Stallman.

    1.    uptightD said

      Really? (?)
      Thanks for the info (?)

    2.    Juan said

      You are a bit lost in computer science history.

  2.   qtrit said

    Small part of the history of the operating system that revolutionized all current technology.

    and what is coming ..