Introduction

The first UNIX operating system is written by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1969 and it first released in 1970.

Rechard Stallman is the first person who is starts the GNU project in 1983 with the goal of creating a free Operating System like –UNIX, and for this work he wrote the GNU General Public License (GPL).

One of another free Operating System which was released in 1977 was the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was developed by UC Berkeley from the 6^th edition of UNIX from AT&T.

Intel released the 80386, the first X86 microprocessor with 32-bit instruction set and MMU with paging, In 1985.

In 1986, Maurice J. Bach, of AT&T Bell Labs, published “The Design of the UNIX Operating System”.

One of the Operating System MINIX, intended for academic use, was released by Andrew S. Tanenbaum in 1987. While source code for the system was available, modification and redistribution were restricted. MINIX’s 16-bit design was not well adapted to the 32-bit features of the increasingly cheap and popular Intel 386 architecture for personal computers.

These factors and the lack of widely adopted, free kernel provided the impetus for Torvalds’s starting his project. He has started that if either the GNU or 386BSD kernels were available at the time he likely would not have written his own.

UNIX / LINUX Index