PS. Yes -- it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable
[sic] (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other
than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.
Reprinted from Linux International Web site
(
www·li·org/linuxhistory.php
)
Minix was a UNIX-like operating system that ran on PCs in the early 1990s. Like Minix, Linux was
also a clone of the UNIX operating system.
For a good way to learn more about how Linux was created, pick up the book Just For
Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Torvalds (2001, HarperCollins).
To truly appreciate how a free operating system could have been modeled after a proprietary sys-
tem from AT&T Bell Laboratories, it helps to understand the culture in which UNIX was created
and the chain of events that made the essence of UNIX possible to reproduce freely.
From a Free-Flowing UNIX Culture at Bell Labs
From the very beginning, the UNIX operating system was created and nurtured in a communal
environment. Its creation was not driven by market needs, but by a desire to overcome impedi-
ments to producing programs. AT&T, which owned the UNIX trademark originally, eventually
made UNIX into a commercial product, but by that time, many of the concepts (and even much
of the early code) that made UNIX special had fallen into the public domain.
If you are under 30 years old, you may not remember a time when AT&T was "the" phone com-
pany. Up until the early 1980s, AT&T didn't have to think much about competition because if
you wanted a phone in the United States, you had to go to AT&T. It had the luxury of funding
pure research projects. The mecca for such projects was the Bell Laboratories site in Murray Hill,
New Jersey.
After the failure of a project called Multics in 1969, Bell Labs employees Ken Thompson and Dennis
Ritchie set off on their own to create an operating system that would offer an improved environment
for developing software. Up to that time, most programs were written on punch cards that had
to be fed in batches to mainframe computers. In a 1980 lecture on "The Evolution of the UNIX
Time-sharing System," Dennis Ritchie summed up the spirit that started UNIX:
What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do program-
ming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience
that the essence of communal computing as supplied by remote-access, time-shared
machines is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to
encourage close communication.
The simplicity and power of the UNIX design began breaking down barriers that impeded software
developers. The foundation of UNIX was set with several key elements:
The UNIX file system -- After creating the structure that allowed levels of subdirectories
(which, for today's desktop users, looks like folders inside of folders), UNIX could be
NOTE
NOTE
9
Starting with Linux
1
