Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Before 1965, the input of the computer was complex and slow, but relatively speaking, the cpu of the computer processed the input data very fast, so cpu spent most of the time idle waiting for the data input. So there was an urgent need for an operating system that could be used by multiple people on a computer and handle multiple tasks at the same time.

In 1965, Bell Lab of AT&T, artificial Intelligence Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and General Electric Company (GE) jointly developed a multi-task and multi-user operating system, called Multcis. Later, because the goal of the Multics project was too large, the project gradually got lost. Around 1969, the project failed and all three companies withdrew.

At that time, many engineers in the Bell lab were already very dependent on the Multics system, and because of the withdrawal of the Bell lab, they could no longer use Multics. Ken Thompson is one of them, he was developing a game called "Space Travel", without the Multics system to run the game, the game project was naturally shelved. Later, Ken found an obsolete PDP-7 (then minicomputer device) in the corner of the lab, so he decided to develop his own operating system on the device to run "Space Travel" games. After a period of hard work, Ken's operating system is beginning to take shape, and he calls it Unics. Later, Ken was happy to recommend his "Space Travel" game to his colleagues, but people were not interested in his game, but they were very interested in the Unics operating system he developed, and everyone installed and learned to use it.

In 1969, by chance, Ken acquired the highest-equipped PDP equipment by taking over a new project. When Ken got the treasure, he began to develop his Unics. At this time, Unics has spread widely in the Bell laboratory, and Dennis Ritchie, a colleague of Ken, has also joined the research and development of the Unics system, which has been renamed Unix.

Dennis and Ken found that because Unix was developed on PDP devices, the system could only run on PDP devices. In order to make their systems run on different hardware platforms, they had to migrate and rewrite the system again and again, so they wanted to rewrite the system in a language more advanced than assembly language. At that time, there was a famous scripting language called B language, but its performance was poor and too simple, so they improved B language and called it C. The powerful C language was born!

In 1974, Ken and Dennis jointly published a paper on Unix, so Unix became widely known, and many people wanted to study and learn about the system. Because Ken and Dennis are employees of Bell laboratory, the Unix they developed naturally also belongs to Bell laboratory. At that time, AT&T had just been ruled by the United States Supreme Court Anti-monopoly Law that it could not sell any goods except telephone and Telegraph, so Unix was provided to various social organizations free of charge. Under the joint efforts of all of us, Unix was gradually added many new features and functions, and became more perfect.

In 1977, Bill 喜悦 (founder of Sun) of Berkeley University modified the Unix source code for his machine, called BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). Starting from BSD, major manufacturers and commercial companies according to their own hardware architecture, and based on BSD system research and development of Unix system, resulting in many different versions of the unix operating system.

In 1979, Bell Lab was independent from AT&T, so that he was no longer subject to the previous court antitrust restrictions on AT&T, so the open right of Unix was withdrawn by Bell Lab, and institutions gave up using Unix because they could not afford to pay Unix royalties. At that time, there were already many companies that rely on packaging and issuing Unix to obtain commercial interests, such as HP,IBM,SUN,Microsoft and so on. This move of Bell Lab naturally caused a lot of commercial disputes, and it was also a major blow to the development of Unix.

After the open right of Unix was withdrawn, universities could not use it freely. In order to teach students about the operating system, Andrew Tanenbaum, a professor at the University of Helsinki in Finland, wrote a system based on Unix, which is called Minix,Minix system fully compatible with Unix. Similarly, Minix is developed by Andrew based on his own computer and cannot be installed on other computers. Some of his students write drivers for Minx in order to run Minx on other devices, but Andrew is reluctant to add these drivers to the system in order to keep the code pure. Therefore, students feel very depressed, including graduate student Linus Torvalds. After carefully studying the design idea of Minix, Linus decided to write an operating system based on Minix.

In 1991, after studying the design idea of Minix, Linus Torvalds developed the Lniux kernel for 386 machines based on gcc and bash.

In 1993, Torvalds released Linux-v1.0, and Linux moved to GPL

In 1994, Slackware, the first commercial release of Linux, was released.

In 1996, Torvalds released Linux-v2.0 and identified Linux's mascot: Penguin.

At this point, Linux is finally born! We have to say that these people are awesome.

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