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UNIX Operating System

UNIX is an operating system which has multi-user, multi-tasking environment,
stability, portability and powerful networking capabilities.

It was first developed in the 1960s, and has been under constant development ever since.

In the late 1960s, researchers from General Electric, MIT and Bell Labs
launched a joint project to develop an ambitious multi-user, multi-tasking OS for mainframe computers known as MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing System). MULTICS failed (for some MULTICS enthusiasts "failed" is perhaps too strong a word to use here), but it did inspire Ken Thompson, who was a researcher at Bell Labs, to have a go at writing a simpler operating system himself.

He wrote a simpler version of MULTICS on a PDP7 in assembler and called his attempt UNICS (Uniplexed Information and Computing System). Because memory and CPU power were at a premium in those days, UNICS (eventually shortened to UNIX) used short commands to minimize the space needed to store them and the time needed to decode them - hence the tradition of short UNIX commands we use today, e.g. ls, cp, rm, mv etc.

Ken Thompson then teamed up with Dennis Ritchie, the author of the first C compiler in 1973. They rewrote the UNIX kernel in C - this was a big step forwards in terms of the system's portability - and released the Fifth Edition of UNIX to universities in 1974. The Seventh Edition, released in 1978, marked a split in UNIX development into two main branches: SYSV (System 5) and BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). BSD arose from the University of California at Berkeley where Ken Thompson spent a sabbatical year. Its development was continued by students at Berkeley and other research institutions. SYSV was developed by AT&T and other commercial companies. UNIX flavours based on SYSV have traditionally been more conservative, but better supported than BSD-based flavours.

The latest incarnations of SYSV (SVR4 or System 5 Release 4) and BSD Unix are actually very similar. Some minor differences are to be found in file system structure, system utility names and options and system call libraries.

Linux Operating System

In 1991, Linus Benedict Torvalds was a second year student of Computer Science at
the University of Helsinki and a self-taught hacker. The 21 year old sandy haired
soft-spoken Finn loved to tinker with the power of the computers and the limits to
which the system can be pushed. But all that was lacking was an operating system that
could meet the demands of the professionals. MINIX was good, but still it was simply
an operating system for the students, designed as a teaching tool rather than an
industry strength one.

Richard Stallman, father of the GNU Project

By 1991, the GNU project created a lot of the tools. The much awaited Gnu C compiler
was available by then, but there was still no operating system. Even MINIX had to be
licensed.(Later, in April 2000, Tanenbaum released Minix under the BSD License.)
Work was going the GNU kernel HURD, but that was not supposed to come out within a few years.

That was too much of a delay for Linus.

Linus himself didn't believe that his creation was going to be big enough to change computing forever. Linux version 0.01 was released by mid September 1991, and was put on the net. Enthusiasm gathered around this new kid on the block, and codes were downloaded, tested, tweaked, and returned to Linus. 0.02 came on October 5th.

Linux version 0.03 came in a few weeks. By December came version 0.10. Still Linux was little more than in skeletal form. It had only support for AT hard disks, had no login
( booted directly to bash). version 0.11 was much better with support for multilingual
keyboards, floppy disk drivers, support for VGA,EGA, Hercules etc. The version numbers went directly from 0.12 to 0.95 and 0.96 and so on.
Soon the code went worldwide via ftp sites at Finland and elsewhere.

This article was referred from the Author: Ragib Hasan

More information, please see https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/linux/