Story of Linux…

Pradip PatilPradip Patil
4 min read

The story of Linux has been started from 1964. It was era of COLD WAR.Both super powers (USA and USSR ) were trying to become more dominant in every field.USSR was little ahead in the field of SPACE . In 1961 Yuri Gagarin from USSR had become first human who travelled in space. This was prominent news at that time. So to achieve the dominance in the field of computer technology USA had tried so many things. Bell Lab organisation in USA was very popular for their various innovations. This lab has various branches ,among that Bell lab at New Jersey had famous due to one project. And that project was To create multiuser , multitasking operating system.Yet it was starting phase of computer era so people were not using computers in their daily life. But few genius peoples had working on that early computers.They had tried to make computer more user friendly. There were 5 peoples who working on that project.They tried but couldn’t succeed. So in 1969 ,three peoples left the project with nervous mind.But there were two peoples who’s hopes were still alive.And their name was Mr Dennies Ritch And Mr Ken Thomson . In 1971 they published UNICS operating system and make it free to all. that means its source code was freely available at that time. In 1972 Dennis Ritchie created C language, so it was speed up stage in the journey of computer era. Next year (1973) UNIX OS published by Bell Lab based on C language. Then in 1975 UNIX version 6 (UNIX v6) launched and these version had changed Boom in the market. The companies like IBM, Apple,Sun etc had started to use that version in their computers. Till that time common peoples in USA were not using desktop computer in their daily life but from 1976 common peoples had started to buy computers . So obviously demand of desktop computers were increased which tuned the production directly. Till now original UNIX was free but it was for understandable to developers only.But by using that UNIX some companies launched their own flavours which got popularity in market and crossed the border of America. (IBM - AIX , SUN - SunSolaris , Apple - macOS ) After 1980 above companies created monopoly in the markets. So only rich peoples had Computers in their homes.few companies started to provide paid versions of that OS . As we know at initially when unixOS created by scientists and published to all at that time it was free to all but few companies launched their user friendly flavours and started to make high profit , So it was not digestible.

Linus Torvalds was the student of Helsinki University. He studied UNIX and he wanted to create OS which is free to all.He studied MINIX OS which developed by Andrew Tanenbaun (Teacher,Writer ). He faced the problem while purchasing computer OS. Till that time UNIX was become viral in western world. And people had started to raise voice against monopoly of few companies. At eve of 1990s “Free software movement ” had launched by some people who where thinking that free and open source OS is right of people.This movement has another name as “GNU movement”.and Mr Richard Stallman was the main leader of that movement .this movement promoted the use of free software which refers to software that users are free to use , modify , share and distribute. It’s not about price but about freedom. Users must have freedom to run , study, adopt and redistribute software. Linus Torvald was the member of that movement. He tried to make UNIX like OS and finally in late 1991 he published Linux OS and make it free to all.some people said that Linux is clone of UNIX but it’s not truth . Linus studied UNIX but He didn’t copy it into UNIX.He created Linus from scratch. Due to free version of UNIX like OS , peoples had started to use it and within time of few years LINUX became widely used OS in the world 🌎.

Be continue with topic related to Linux in next blog…..

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Pradip Patil
Pradip Patil