A Brief History of Linux

In 1964, Bell Laboratories started a project in New Jersey. The purpose of this project was to create a multitask, multiuser operating system. After working for 4 to 5 years, Bell Laboratories stopped this project in 1969.

Following the discontinuation of the project, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, members of the New Jersey project, continued to contemplate its potential and believed it should be pursued further.

In 1969, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson restarted the project from scratch and developed the operating system known as UNICS (Uniplexed Information and Computing Service), which was offered for free. Later on, it evolved into UNIX.

In 1975, a new version of UNIX called UNIX v6 was released, and it quickly gained popularity.

Due to the availability of free code, many companies started creating their own operating systems in 1975, resulting in various versions of UNIX, commonly referred to as UNIX flavors.

UNIX flavors: IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, macOS, HP-UX.

As UNIX became older, other versions of UNIX created by different companies were no longer free and became expensive. Linus Torvalds, a university student who wanted to work on his project, found it difficult to proceed as the existing versions of UNIX were costly.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student, learned from Andrew Tanenbaum, a professor at the university who created MINIX OS for teaching students. Linus Torvalds studied MINIX OS and then developed his own operating system called Linux. Linux was made available for free to all.

Actually, when we refer to Linux, it is not the entire operating system (OS) but rather the kernel. Linux combines with the GNU software to form a complete operating system. GNU is a collection of software that is part of the free software movement, which was active between 1991 and 1995.

Now, since the Linux code was free, different companies started creating their own versions of Linux, which are known as flavors of Linux.

Linux flavors: Ubuntu, CentOS, Amazon Linux, Red Hat, Kali Linux, etc

Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution developed by Canonical Ltd., a company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth.

Linux Features:

1. Open source
2. Light weight
3. Secure
4. Multiuser — Multitask
5. Simplified updates for all Installed software.
6. Multiple Distributions- Ubuntu, CentOS, Amazon Linux, Red Hat etc.

Operating System:

1. CLI ( Command line Interface )
2. GUI ( Graphical User Interface )

Windows / Linux

1. Folder / Directory
2. Administrator / Root user
3. File / File
4. Software / Package
5. NTFS / ext4,ext3 (storage)

Windows vs Linux Architecture Difference

File System Hierarchy