Linux history
(Written by Paul Cobbaut, https://github.com/paulcobbaut/)
This chapter briefly tells the history of Unix and where Linux fits in.
If you are eager to start working with Linux without this blah, blah,
blah over history, distributions, and licensing then jump straight to
Part II - Chapter 8. Working with Directories page 73.
1969
All modern operating systems have their roots in 1969 when
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
developed the C language and the Unix operating system
at AT&T Bell Labs. They shared their source code (yes, there was open
source back in the Seventies) with the rest of the world, including the
hippies in Berkeley California. By 1975, when AT&T started selling Unix
commercially, about half of the source code was written by others. The
hippies were not happy that a commercial company sold software that they
had written; the resulting (legal) battle ended in there being two
versions of Unix: the official AT&T Unix, and the free
BSD Unix.
Development of BSD descendants like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD and PC-BSD is still active today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems
1980s
In the Eighties many companies started developing their own Unix:
IBM created AIX, Sun
SunOS (later Solaris), HP
HP-UX and about a dozen other companies did the same. The
result was a mess of Unix dialects and a dozen different ways to do the
same thing. And here is the first real root of Linux, when
Richard Stallman aimed to end this era of Unix
separation and everybody re-inventing the wheel by starting the
GNU project (GNU is Not Unix). His goal was to make an
operating system that was freely available to everyone, and where
everyone could work together (like in the Seventies). Many of the
command line tools that you use today on Linux are GNU tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX
1990s
The Nineties started with Linus Torvalds, a Swedish
speaking Finnish student, buying a 386 computer and writing a brand new
POSIX compliant kernel. He put the source code online, thinking it would
never support anything but 386 hardware. Many people embraced the
combination of this kernel with the GNU tools, and the rest, as they
say, is history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
https://lwn.net
http://www.levenez.com/unix/ (a huge Unix history poster)
2015
Today more than 97 percent of the world\'s supercomputers (including the
complete top 10), more than 80 percent of all smartphones, many millions
of desktop computers, around 70 percent of all web servers, a large
chunk of tablet computers, and several appliances (dvd-players, washing
machines, dsl modems, routers, self-driving cars, space station
laptops...) run Linux. Linux is by far the most commonly used
operating system in the world.
Linux kernel version 4.0 was released in April 2015. Its source code grew by several hundred thousand lines (compared to version 3.19 from February 2015) thanks to contributions of thousands of developers paid by hundreds of commercial companies including Red Hat, Intel, Samsung, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, IBM, Novell, Qualcomm, Nokia, Oracle, Google, AMD and even Microsoft (and many more).
http://kernelnewbies.org/DevelopmentStatistics
http://kernel.org
http://www.top500.org