The whole story of Linux. Part I: how it all began
This year, the Linux kernel turns 27 years old. OS based on it is used by many corporations, government, research institutions and data centers around the world.
For more than a quarter of a century, quite a few articles have been published (including on Habré), telling about different segments of the history of Linux. In this series of materials we decided to highlight the most significant and interesting facts related to this operating system.
Let's start with the developments that preceded Linux, and the history of the first version of the kernel.
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/ Flickr / Toshiyuki IMAI / CC BY-SA
The advent of Linux is considered one of the most important events in the history of open source software. The birth of this operating system is largely due to the ideas and tools that have been formed and “ripened” for decades among developers. Therefore, to begin with, let us turn to the origins of the “open source movement”.
At the dawn of the 1950s, most of the software in the United States was created by university and laboratory staff and distributed without any restrictions. This was done to simplify the exchange of knowledge in the scientific community. The first open source decision of that period is the A-2 system, written for the UNIVAC Remington Rand computer in 1953.
In the same years, the first free software development group, SHARE, was formed. They worked on the model of " joint peer-to-peer production ." The result of the work of this group towards the end of the 50s was the OS of the same name.
This system (and other SHARE products) was popular with computer equipment manufacturers. Due to the policy of openness, they could offer customers not only hardware, but also software without additional costs.
In 1959, Applied Data Research (ADR) received an order from the RCA organization to write a program for auto-filling flowcharts. The developers have done the job, but did not agree with the RCA in the price. In order not to “throw out” the finished product, the solution for the IBM 1401 platform was remade in ADR and they began to independently implement it. However, sales did not go very well, as many users were waiting for a free alternative to the ADR solution, which was planned at IBM.
ADR could not allow the release of a free product with similar functionality. Therefore, the developer Martin Goetz (Martin Goetz) from ADR filed a patent for the program and in 1968 was the first in US history to receive it. From this point on, it is customary to count the era of commercialization in the development industry - from a "bonus" to software, it has become an independent product.
The latter was too complex and worked only on the GE-600 and Honeywell 6000 platforms. Rewritten in SI, Unix should have become portable and easier to use (thanks largely to the hierarchical file system with a single root directory).
In the 50s, AT & T holding, which at the time was part of Bell Labs, signed an agreement with the US government banning corporations from selling software. For this reason, the first users of Unix - scientific organizations - received the source code of the OS for free.
AT & T drifted away from the concept of free software distribution in the early 80s. As a result of the forced division of the corporation into several companies, the ban on the sale of software ceased to operate, and the holding ceased free distribution of Unix. Developers were threatened with claims for unauthorized exchange of source code. The threats were not groundless - since 1980, computer programs have become the subject of copyright in the United States.
Not all developers were satisfied with the conditions that dictated by AT & T. A group of enthusiasts from the University of California at Berkeley took up the search for an alternative solution. In the 70s, the school received a license from AT & T, and enthusiasts began to create on its basis a new distribution, which later became the Unix Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD.
An open Unix-like system was successful, which was immediately noticed by AT & T. The company sued , and the BSD authors had to remove and replace all the involved Unix source code. This slowed down the distribution of Berkeley Software Distribution in those years. The latest version of the system was released in 1994, but the very fact of the emergence of a free and open OS became an important milestone in the history of open-source projects.
/ Flickr / Christopher Michel / CC BY / Photo Cropped
In the late 1970s, MIT staff members wrote a driver for a printer installed in one of the classrooms. When the paper got stuck and a queue of print jobs was created, users received a notification asking them to fix the problem. Later in the department a new printer appeared, for which employees wanted to add such a function. But for this you needed the source code of the first driver. Regular programmer Richard Matthew Stallman (Richard M. Stallman) requested it from colleagues, but was refused - it turned out that this is confidential information.
This minor episode may have become one of the most crucial in the history of free software. Stallman was indignant because of the status quo. He was not satisfied with the restrictions imposed on the exchange of source code in the IT environment. Therefore, Stallman decided to create an open operating system and allow enthusiasts to freely make changes to it.
In September 1983, he announced the creation of the GNU project - GNU's Not UNIX ("GNU is not Unix"). It was based on a manifesto that served as the basis for a free software license, the GNU General Public License (GPL). This step was the beginning of an active movement for open source software.
A few years later, the professor at Amsterdam Free University, Andrew Tanenbaum (Andrew S. Tanenbaum), developed the Unix-like Minix system as a teaching tool. He wanted to make it as accessible as possible to the students. The publisher of his book, to which the OS was attached, insisted at least on the nominal fee for working with the system. Andrew and the publisher came to a compromise on a $ 69 license. In the early 90s, Minix gained popularity among developers. And she was destined to become the basis for developing Linux.
/ Flickr / Christopher Michel / CC BY
In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a young programmer at the University of Helsinki, mastered Minix. His experiments with the OS have evolved into work on a completely new kernel. On August 25th, Linus made an open survey of the Minix user group about what does not suit them in this OS, and announced the development of a new operating system. In the August letter there are several important points about the future OS:
August 25th is considered to be the birthday of Linux. Linus himself is counting from another date - September 17th. It was on this day that he uploaded the first release of Linux (0.01) to an FTP server and sent an email to people who showed interest in his announcement and survey. In the source code of the first release, the word "Freaks" has been preserved. So Torvalds planned to name his core (a combination of the words "free", "freak" and Unix). The administrator of the FTP server did not like the name, and he renamed the project to Linux.
Then followed a series of updates. In October of the same year, the kernel version 0.02 was released, and in December - 0.11. Linux was originally distributed without a GPL license. This meant that the developers could use the kernel, modify it, but did not have the right to resell the results of their work. Starting from February 1992, all commercial restrictions were lifted - with the release of version 0.12, Torvalds changed the license to GNU GPL v2. This step, Linus later called one of the determining factors for the success of Linux.
The popularity of Linux among Minix developers has grown. For some time, discussions took place in the Usenet comp.os.minix feed. At the beginning of 92nd, the creator of Minix, Andrew Tanenbaum, launched a community core architecture dispute , saying that “Linux is outdated.” The reason, in his opinion, was the monolithic core of the OS, which in some parameters is inferior to the Minix microkernel. Another claim by Tanenbaum concerned the “binding” of Linux to the x86 processor line, which, according to the professors' forecasts, should have faded into oblivion in the near future. Linus himself and the users of both OSs entered into the controversy. As a result of the dispute, the community was divided into two camps, while Linux supporters had their own feed - comp.os.linux.
The community was engaged in the expansion of the functionality of the basic version - the first drivers were developed, the file system. The earliest versions of Linux fit on two diskettes and consisted of a boot disk with a kernel and a root disk that installed the file system and several basic programs from the GNU toolkit.
The first distribution, MCC Interim Linux, was created based on version 0.12 in February 1992. Its author, a programmer from the Computer Center of the University of Manchester, called the development an “experiment” to eliminate some of the flaws in the kernel installation procedure and add a number of functions.
Shortly thereafter, the number of user distributions increased significantly. Many of them have remained local projects that have “ lived ” for no more than five years, for example, Softlanding Linux System (SLS). However, there were distributions, which managed not only to “gain a foothold” in the market, but also largely influence the further development of open-source projects. In 1993, the release of two distributions, Slackware and Debian, took place, which gave a start to serious changes in the free software industry.
Debian was created by Ian Murdock with the support of the Stallman Free Software Foundation. He was thought of as an “elegant” alternative to the SLS. Debian is supported to this day and is one of the most popular Linux-based development. On its basis, in turn, a number of other distributions important for the history of the kernel were created - for example, Ubuntu.
As for Slackware, this is another early and successful Linux-based project. His first version was released in 1993. According to some estimates , after two years, Slackware already accounted for about 80% of Linux installations. And a decade later, the distribution remained popular among developers.
In 1992, SUSE was founded in Germany (the acronym for Software- und System-Entwicklung is software and systems development). She was the first to launch Linux-based products for business clients. The first distribution that SUSE began to work with was Slackware, adapted for German-speaking users.
From this moment begins the era of commercialization in the history of Linux, which we will discuss in the next article.
For more than a quarter of a century, quite a few articles have been published (including on Habré), telling about different segments of the history of Linux. In this series of materials we decided to highlight the most significant and interesting facts related to this operating system.
Let's start with the developments that preceded Linux, and the history of the first version of the kernel.
')
/ Flickr / Toshiyuki IMAI / CC BY-SA
The Era of the Free Market
The advent of Linux is considered one of the most important events in the history of open source software. The birth of this operating system is largely due to the ideas and tools that have been formed and “ripened” for decades among developers. Therefore, to begin with, let us turn to the origins of the “open source movement”.
At the dawn of the 1950s, most of the software in the United States was created by university and laboratory staff and distributed without any restrictions. This was done to simplify the exchange of knowledge in the scientific community. The first open source decision of that period is the A-2 system, written for the UNIVAC Remington Rand computer in 1953.
In the same years, the first free software development group, SHARE, was formed. They worked on the model of " joint peer-to-peer production ." The result of the work of this group towards the end of the 50s was the OS of the same name.
This system (and other SHARE products) was popular with computer equipment manufacturers. Due to the policy of openness, they could offer customers not only hardware, but also software without additional costs.
Commerce Coming and Unix Birth
In 1959, Applied Data Research (ADR) received an order from the RCA organization to write a program for auto-filling flowcharts. The developers have done the job, but did not agree with the RCA in the price. In order not to “throw out” the finished product, the solution for the IBM 1401 platform was remade in ADR and they began to independently implement it. However, sales did not go very well, as many users were waiting for a free alternative to the ADR solution, which was planned at IBM.
ADR could not allow the release of a free product with similar functionality. Therefore, the developer Martin Goetz (Martin Goetz) from ADR filed a patent for the program and in 1968 was the first in US history to receive it. From this point on, it is customary to count the era of commercialization in the development industry - from a "bonus" to software, it has become an independent product.
At about the same time, a small team of programmers from Bell Labs began work on the operating system for the PDP-7 mini-computer - Unix. Unix was created as an alternative to another OS - Multics.
The latter was too complex and worked only on the GE-600 and Honeywell 6000 platforms. Rewritten in SI, Unix should have become portable and easier to use (thanks largely to the hierarchical file system with a single root directory).
In the 50s, AT & T holding, which at the time was part of Bell Labs, signed an agreement with the US government banning corporations from selling software. For this reason, the first users of Unix - scientific organizations - received the source code of the OS for free.
AT & T drifted away from the concept of free software distribution in the early 80s. As a result of the forced division of the corporation into several companies, the ban on the sale of software ceased to operate, and the holding ceased free distribution of Unix. Developers were threatened with claims for unauthorized exchange of source code. The threats were not groundless - since 1980, computer programs have become the subject of copyright in the United States.
Not all developers were satisfied with the conditions that dictated by AT & T. A group of enthusiasts from the University of California at Berkeley took up the search for an alternative solution. In the 70s, the school received a license from AT & T, and enthusiasts began to create on its basis a new distribution, which later became the Unix Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD.
An open Unix-like system was successful, which was immediately noticed by AT & T. The company sued , and the BSD authors had to remove and replace all the involved Unix source code. This slowed down the distribution of Berkeley Software Distribution in those years. The latest version of the system was released in 1994, but the very fact of the emergence of a free and open OS became an important milestone in the history of open-source projects.
/ Flickr / Christopher Michel / CC BY / Photo Cropped
Back to the origins of free software
In the late 1970s, MIT staff members wrote a driver for a printer installed in one of the classrooms. When the paper got stuck and a queue of print jobs was created, users received a notification asking them to fix the problem. Later in the department a new printer appeared, for which employees wanted to add such a function. But for this you needed the source code of the first driver. Regular programmer Richard Matthew Stallman (Richard M. Stallman) requested it from colleagues, but was refused - it turned out that this is confidential information.
This minor episode may have become one of the most crucial in the history of free software. Stallman was indignant because of the status quo. He was not satisfied with the restrictions imposed on the exchange of source code in the IT environment. Therefore, Stallman decided to create an open operating system and allow enthusiasts to freely make changes to it.
In September 1983, he announced the creation of the GNU project - GNU's Not UNIX ("GNU is not Unix"). It was based on a manifesto that served as the basis for a free software license, the GNU General Public License (GPL). This step was the beginning of an active movement for open source software.
A few years later, the professor at Amsterdam Free University, Andrew Tanenbaum (Andrew S. Tanenbaum), developed the Unix-like Minix system as a teaching tool. He wanted to make it as accessible as possible to the students. The publisher of his book, to which the OS was attached, insisted at least on the nominal fee for working with the system. Andrew and the publisher came to a compromise on a $ 69 license. In the early 90s, Minix gained popularity among developers. And she was destined to become the basis for developing Linux.
/ Flickr / Christopher Michel / CC BY
The birth of Linux and the first distros
In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a young programmer at the University of Helsinki, mastered Minix. His experiments with the OS have evolved into work on a completely new kernel. On August 25th, Linus made an open survey of the Minix user group about what does not suit them in this OS, and announced the development of a new operating system. In the August letter there are several important points about the future OS:
- the system will be free;
- the system will be similar to Minix, but the source code will be completely different;
- the system will not be "as big and professional as GNU."
August 25th is considered to be the birthday of Linux. Linus himself is counting from another date - September 17th. It was on this day that he uploaded the first release of Linux (0.01) to an FTP server and sent an email to people who showed interest in his announcement and survey. In the source code of the first release, the word "Freaks" has been preserved. So Torvalds planned to name his core (a combination of the words "free", "freak" and Unix). The administrator of the FTP server did not like the name, and he renamed the project to Linux.
Then followed a series of updates. In October of the same year, the kernel version 0.02 was released, and in December - 0.11. Linux was originally distributed without a GPL license. This meant that the developers could use the kernel, modify it, but did not have the right to resell the results of their work. Starting from February 1992, all commercial restrictions were lifted - with the release of version 0.12, Torvalds changed the license to GNU GPL v2. This step, Linus later called one of the determining factors for the success of Linux.
The popularity of Linux among Minix developers has grown. For some time, discussions took place in the Usenet comp.os.minix feed. At the beginning of 92nd, the creator of Minix, Andrew Tanenbaum, launched a community core architecture dispute , saying that “Linux is outdated.” The reason, in his opinion, was the monolithic core of the OS, which in some parameters is inferior to the Minix microkernel. Another claim by Tanenbaum concerned the “binding” of Linux to the x86 processor line, which, according to the professors' forecasts, should have faded into oblivion in the near future. Linus himself and the users of both OSs entered into the controversy. As a result of the dispute, the community was divided into two camps, while Linux supporters had their own feed - comp.os.linux.
The community was engaged in the expansion of the functionality of the basic version - the first drivers were developed, the file system. The earliest versions of Linux fit on two diskettes and consisted of a boot disk with a kernel and a root disk that installed the file system and several basic programs from the GNU toolkit.
Gradually, the community began to develop the first Linux distributions. Most of the earlier versions were created by enthusiasts, not by companies.
The first distribution, MCC Interim Linux, was created based on version 0.12 in February 1992. Its author, a programmer from the Computer Center of the University of Manchester, called the development an “experiment” to eliminate some of the flaws in the kernel installation procedure and add a number of functions.
Shortly thereafter, the number of user distributions increased significantly. Many of them have remained local projects that have “ lived ” for no more than five years, for example, Softlanding Linux System (SLS). However, there were distributions, which managed not only to “gain a foothold” in the market, but also largely influence the further development of open-source projects. In 1993, the release of two distributions, Slackware and Debian, took place, which gave a start to serious changes in the free software industry.
Debian was created by Ian Murdock with the support of the Stallman Free Software Foundation. He was thought of as an “elegant” alternative to the SLS. Debian is supported to this day and is one of the most popular Linux-based development. On its basis, in turn, a number of other distributions important for the history of the kernel were created - for example, Ubuntu.
As for Slackware, this is another early and successful Linux-based project. His first version was released in 1993. According to some estimates , after two years, Slackware already accounted for about 80% of Linux installations. And a decade later, the distribution remained popular among developers.
In 1992, SUSE was founded in Germany (the acronym for Software- und System-Entwicklung is software and systems development). She was the first to launch Linux-based products for business clients. The first distribution that SUSE began to work with was Slackware, adapted for German-speaking users.
From this moment begins the era of commercialization in the history of Linux, which we will discuss in the next article.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/441554/
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