The history of Linux

The original version of this text was donated under the GNU copyleft by Hans Paijmans in 2000. It gives insight into the history of open source, GNU and Linux. Some changes have been made by me and it has been translated to English.

Linux is first and foremost a Unix system and Unix has historically been from and for universities. As such it is firmly anchored in a centuries-old scientific tradition of open communication and exchange. In that environment systems are not, or not only, developed for financial gain, but primarily for peer recognition. Both Unix and Linux have arisen from a strong and constant urge in humans: the desire to be respected by your colleagues.

Unix was developed in the late 1960s / early 1970s as a small operating system that had to be capable of running on extremely diverse hardware and executing tasks for multiple users simultaneously. Since the very beginning the source code was readily available for anyone who wanted to tinker with it. Of course that happened mostly at universities and research institutes and it's not an exaggeration to say Unix was the result of hundreds of computer scientists.

It is typical for this anarchistic environment of scientists and students that a culture of humor and tall tales quickly developed around this operating system and it came as a blow to many when Unix was suddenly commercialized in the early 1980s. Gone was the ability to inspect the source code and experiment with alternative algorithms. Computers had become big business and the source code of software was kept just as secret as the recipe for Coca Cola. The commercialization of Unix quickly led to fragmentation into as many expensive variants as there were hardware platforms. In the meantime Microsoft took over the market for the home computer.

Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, things looked bad for Unix. The mass market had been conquered by Microsoft and the high price of the various Unix systems prevented serious work on a Unix for PCs. Only Microsoft had experimented with its own Unix for PCs, called Xenix, and that had taken on a life of its own as SCO Unix. So Unix on the PC was possible, but a complete installation cost thousands of euros, which no home user could afford.

In 1991 things changed dramatically. A Finnish student by the name of Linus Torvalds was annoyed by the fact that his favorite operating system, Unix, could not run on his PC at home. When he heard about Minix, a Unix-inspired OS created by Andy Tanenbaum at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, he was immediately interested. It lacked functionality though that Tanenbaum did not want to add. The goal of Minix was to remain small in order to be usable as teaching material.

So Linus decided to make something himself which was eventually named Linux. The brilliant part was that he used the internet, which had long been popular at universities, to find supporters who wanted to collaborate on a Unix for PCs and release it under the GNU copyleft. Linus' famous 1991 Usenet message began as follows:

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.

We mustn't forget that on a typical Linux system with loads of free software, only a tiny fraction (the kernel) is really “Linux”. The rest consists of software written by others under the GNU copyleft and made available to the rest of the world. And therein lies Linus Torvalds' greatest achievement: bringing all these existing bits together into a coherent operating system. With this, Unix was ​finally back where it belongs: in the world of openness, education and experimentation, of collaboration and peer recognition.

What has probably become clear is that Unix has been important in the history of operating systems. Many operating systems have been derived from it or have been inspired by it. Unix was originally developed at Bell Labs in 1969, by (among others) Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The source code for the operating system was provided to universities. This made it easy for users to make their own modifications.

Many different variants of the system emerged, which Bell Labs combined into a single system between 1977 and 1982. This created UNIX System III. More and more features were added, which led to UNIX System V.2, also known as SysV.

Another important branch is that of BSD, the Berkeley Software Distribution from the University of California in Berkeley. Derived from BSD are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and Darwin, which formed the basis for Mac OS X (now called macOS).