Unix – The father of our beloved Linux

The history of Unix begins at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1960s with a small team of programmers looking to write a multi-tasking, multi-user operating system for the PDP-7. Two of the most notable members of this team at the Bell Labs research facility were Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. While many of the concepts of this system were derived from its predecessor, the decision of the Unix team in the early 1970s to rewrite this small operating system in the C language is what separated Unix from all the others.

In addition to this new portability, which allowed this to rapidly expand beyond Bell Labs to other research, academic, and even commercial uses, several key operating system design principles were attractive to users and programmers. On the one hand, Ken Thompson’s Unix philosophy became a powerful model of modular software design and computation. The philosophy of this system, recommended using specially designed small programs in combination to perform complex tasks in general.

In the late 1970 and 1980, Unix became the root of a family tree that expanded through research, academia, and a growing commercial business of Unix operating systems. It was not open source software, and the Unix source code could be licensed through agreements with its owner, AT&T. The first known software license was sold to the University of Illinois in 1975.

What we now call the Linux operating system is actually the combination of two efforts from the early 1990. Richard Stallman sought to create a truly free and open source alternative to the proprietary Unix system. I was working on the utilities and programs under the name GNU, a recursive acronym that stands for “GNU is not Unix!” Although there was a kernel project underway, it proved difficult, and without a kernel, the dream of the free and open source operating system could not be realized. It was the work of Linus Torvald producing a workable and functional kernel he called Linux that brought the entire operating system to life.

Check also:
ls – Unix operating system command
Linux Foundation – The future of Linux

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