25 Years of Linux

jeremy · 08-25-2016, 09:23 AM

Quote:

On August 25, 1991, an obscure student in Finland named Linus Benedict Torvalds posted a message to the comp.os.minix Usenet newsgroup saying that he was working on a free operating system as a project to learn about the x86 architecture. He cannot possibly have known that he was launching a project that would change the computing industry in fundamental ways. Twenty-five years later, it is fair to say that none of us foresaw where Linux would go — a lesson that should be taken to heart when trying to imagine where it might go from here.

At the time of the announcement, Linux was vaporware; the first source release wouldn't come for another month. It wasn't even named "Linux"; we can all be happy that the original name ("Freax") didn't stick. When the code did come out, it was a mere 10,000 lines long; the kernel community now adds that much code over the course of about three days. There was no network stack, only Finnish keyboards were supported, many basic system calls were absent, and Linus didn't think it would ever be possible to port the kernel to a non-x86 architecture. It was, in other words, a toy system, not something that seemed poised to take over the world.

Some context

The computing industry in 1991 looked a little different than it does now. A whole set of Unix-based vendors had succeeded in displacing much of the minicomputer market but, in the process, they had turned Unix into numerous incompatible proprietary systems, each of which had its own problems and none of which could be fixed by its users. Unix, in moving down from minicomputers, had become much more widespread, but it also lost the code-sharing culture that had helped to make it Unix in the first place. The consequences of the Unix wars were already being felt, and we were being told by the trade press that the upcoming Windows NT release would be the end of Unix altogether. Unix vendors were developing NT-based systems, and the industry was being prepared for a Microsoft-only future.

Meanwhile, the GNU project had been underway for the better part of a decade. Impressive progress had been made on GCC and a whole set of low-level command-line utilities, but Richard Stallman's vision of an entirely free operating system remained unrealized and, in many minds, unattainable. We could put the GNU utilities on our proprietary Unix workstations and use them to build other free components — notably the X Window System — but we couldn't get away from that proprietary base. 32-Bit x86-based computers were becoming available at reasonable prices, but the Unix systems available on them were just as proprietary as the rest; there appeared to be little hope of a freely available BSD system at that time.

Linux jumped into this void with a kernel that was designed for 32-bit processors, a free license, and the ability to make use of the user-level free software that was already out there. Most importantly, Linux had a maintainer who was happy to take significant changes from others, and the Internet had become widespread enough to enable the creation of a large (for the time) development community. Suddenly, we had our free system that anybody could improve, and many people did. Before long, the gaps in Linux started to be filled.

Over the following years amazing things happened. Proprietary Unix did indeed die off as expected, but Microsoft's takeover of the rest of the computing industry did not quite go as planned. An industry that was doing its best to go completely closed was forced (after years of mocking and derision) to adopt a more open development model. Those of us who worked on Linux — the many thousands who worked at all levels, not just on the kernel — have changed the world in a huge and mostly positive way.

More at LWN...

Happy Birthday Linux!

--jeremy

jeremy · 08-25-2016, 02:55 PM

A birthday interview by ZDNet:

Quote:

SJVN: What's Linux real birthday? You're the proud papa, when do you think it was? When you sent out the newsgroup post to the Minix newsgroup on August 25, 1991? When you sent out the 0.01 release to a few friends?

LT: I think both of them are valid birthdays.

The first newsgroup post is more public (August 25), and you can find it with headers giving date and time and everything. In contrast, I don't think the 0.01 release was ever announced in any public setting (only in private to a few people who had shown interest, and I don't think any of those emails survive). These days the way to find the 0.01 date (September 17) is to go and look at the dates of the files in the tar-file that still remains.

So, both of them work for me. Or either.

And, by the way, some people will argue for yet other days. For example, the earliest public semi-mention of Linux was July 3: that was the first time I asked for some POSIX docs publicly on the minix newsgroup and mentioned I was working on a project (but didn't name it). And at the other end, October 5 was the first time I actually publicly announced a Linux version: "version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already)".

So you might have to buy four cakes if you want to cover all the eventualities.

Quote:

SJVN: When did you realize that Linux was going to be bigger than GNU or Minix [Andrew Tannenbaum's ground-breaking free software Unix-like operating system for students]?

LT: Oh, that happened early. I started doing some paging to disk around Christmas 1991, and at that point, Linux was doing things that Minix didn't. It was one of the reasons why the release numbering jumped from 0.03 (perhaps November 1991) to 0.12 (January 1992).
The 25 biggest events in Linux's 25-year...

That wasn't exactly radical (people had made Minix extensions that did paging etc), but it was a sign that Linux was starting to do things that I wasn't used to Minix doing.

By summer 1992, we had X running and Linux just looked like a completely different animal from the Minix I had grown used to (but I don't even know what Minix did afterward).

The rest happened pretty gradually and never really hit me as being as exceptional as the early 1992 realization that there were actually people I didn't know who were using and tinkering with Linux.

Quote:

SJVN: Looking back at it all, what do you think the really significant releases were?

LT: For me, personally, 0.03 was a big step, which is when Linux became self-hosting for the first time, I think. And 0.12 was when suddenly it was almost useful to some people, and you could actually do some limited real work with it (and when the aforementioned "hey, people I don't know are using it" happened). Admittedly you had to be pretty hardcore to play around with it, but there are still active kernel developers around from that timeframe.

But, realistically, "significant" for anybody else would come much later. 1.0 is obviously always a milestone (and took years to reach), and in many ways, the really significant events ended up being not so much about releases, but about all the companies that started supporting it. And I'm not just talking the big Oracle and IBM announcements, but the much earlier events like the first (very small-scale) commercial distributions of floppies in 1992 etc were even bigger events, and only indirectly related to my releases.

--jeremy

Mitt Green · 08-25-2016, 03:12 PM

Time is flying, things change and the only thing remains the same: I still prefer Freax to Linux.

fatmac · 08-30-2016, 12:46 PM

Linux is here to stay, along with BSD, in its various forms, this unix based system will only grow more powerful, & more people will realise that this is how it should be.

(Don't forget that it's a version of (Free)BSD under that Apple veneer.

)