A brief history of Linux

Since 1969, the computing world is being revolutionized by the advent of various operating systems. UNIX (Uniplexed Information and Computing System) was found by AT&T Employees at Bell lab and kick-started the OS revolution.

Then Xerox invented a PC and an ideal Desktop OS but was shy to market it. On a friendly visit to Xerox, Mr. Jobs of Apple saw the project and wondered as to the GUI. He set the Mac Project on. It was a big hit in 1985 and revolutionized the Computer world.

Since Mac is a closed project in the sense is not available for all hardware, IBM tried to find an OS-2 to compete with OS-X of Mac and failed miserably in 1987.

Hence MS was called to develop a OS for all systems having OS-X features to the extent possible by all Computer Manufacturers. The reason is two :

a) MS have been working with Apple for 10 years at that time and

b) Excel & DOS designed by MS was incredible.

Thus windows was born and it was a Very Big Hit and Windows 1987 to 1995 became the standard for all OS Development.

People wanted to give OS Free, this is an idea borrowed from Hackers and Wazinok of Apple. Therefore two separate Open Source Project was born from Unix – BSD and Linux.

BSD stands for “Berkeley Software Distribution”. It is the name of distributions of source code from the University of California, Berkeley, which were originally extensions to AT&T's Research UNIX operating system. The BSD is being academic focused and is always used by closed group of persons, it is not known and I too despite a fact used it for a month, find it difficult to trace it back and use it.

Linus Torwalds of Finland invented the Linux Kernel and the platform on which all Linux Distros works. The word Linux stands for Linu's Unix. However again the Bell Lab guys put a case and the Linux no more represents Unix.

Then in 1991-4 Red Hat made a Binary Based Linux called Red-hat Enterprise Linux. They used Restricted Binary Package Manager – the concept found by themselves and as every one used the same concept and is made available free, they changed it to Red-Hat Package Management Concept to make it a proprietary one.

The Red-hat was forced to give some thing free to public as they are using GNU & Linux which are essentially open source. Hence they created two Projects – CENT-OS and Mandrakes Red-hat. Later on Mandrakes was spun off and it went to join a debian based linux company called Connectivia. The space was given to Fedora.

Debian came for academic purpose and then went on for Home and Office use.

From Red-hat and BSD some engineers moved and started a Gentoo Linux which have no per-compilers. Finally recently Arch Linux and few arch-based distributions have also come. (As told by Mr. Narayanan)