Our story begins in 1964 at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. A team of visionary computer scientists set out to create a new operating system. By 1969, their efforts, led by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, bore fruit with the creation of an operating system they named Unics, which stood for Uniplexed Information and Computing Services. This system was designed to be simpler and more elegant than its predecessors, and it eventually evolved into Unix.
Unix quickly gained popularity due to its flexibility, power, and portability. By 1975, Unix Version 6 had been released which was free, making Unix widely available and setting a new standard for operating systems. Unix's modular design and powerful features inspired many other operating systems. Among these were:
These systems were all flavors of Unix, built on its robust foundation but tailored to meet different needs and preferences.
In the early 1980s, a new movement began to take shape. Richard Stallman, a computer scientist, became increasingly frustrated with the proprietary nature of most software. He believed that software should be free for anyone to use, modify, and share. In 1983, he launched the GNU Project (GNU's Not Unix) with the goal of creating a free Unix-like operating system. He also founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to support this vision.
In 1991, at the University of Helsinki a young Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds was using an operating system called MINIX(a UNIX operating system), developed by his professor Andrew Tanenbaum for educational purposes. Linus found Minix limiting and other UNIX distros are expensive and not open-source, so he decided to create his own operating system kernel to create a system similar to MINIX. He announced his project on an internet forum, inviting others to contribute, and named his creation "Linux."
Linus released the first version of Linux on September 17, 1991. His decision to make it free and open-source allowed programmers worldwide to collaborate on improving it.
While Linus had created a powerful kernel, a complete operating system requires more than just a kernel. Fortunately, the GNU Project had already developed many of the necessary tools and utilities. By combining the Linux kernel with GNU components, a full operating system was born: GNU/Linux.
Linux's open-source nature and the collaborative effort of the global community led to the creation of various distributions, or "distros." These distros are essentially different flavors of Linux, each designed to meet specific needs and preferences. Some popular Linux distributions include: