Linux History

Although the Linux Kernel was written by Linus Torvalds in 1991, what we know as Linux today started much further back. In 1968 the Internet (then known as ARPANET) only included four universities: The University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), the University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. Okay, lets skip ahead a little bit. ARPA became DARPA and later the Internet. Computing was limited to large computers until the the first home computers started coming out in the late 1970s. Part of the problem was that UNIX the common operating system cost too much money to run on the smaller computers. Home users had to settle for the only operating system in their price range. By 1990 the Internet had expanded to more than 300,000 host computers. A professor named Andrew S. Tanenbaum wrote from scratch the MINUX operating system and published a book called ``Operating System''. With this book was the code for the MINUX system. Computer Science students all over read the secrets of operating systems. Linus Torvalds, a student of Computer Science at University of Helsinki, inspired and helped by the GNU project and free software wrote the Linux kernel and released it as Open Source. With Linux an open source project, hackers all over the Internet community did their best to help test and write parts of the operating system. Today you can get Linux installed for almost every processor you can buy. Linux runs on everything from supercomputers to Palm Pilots.