History of GNU and Linux

Origins of the GNU Project

The origins of the GNU Project began around 1983, its purpose to develop a free and complete UNIX-like system. The Project, however, is quick to point out that one should think of “free” in terms of “free speech" not “free beer."

The name GNU (pronounced g-noo), rather deliberately, is a recursive acronym for “GNU is Not Unix,” not to be confused with the African gnu (pronounced noo or nyoo), which is either of two large African ox-like antelopes having drooping mane and beards, long tufted tails, and curved horns in both sexes. Although, in an ironic twist, the gnu has been adopted as the GNU's unofficial mascott.

It all started as the brainchild of illustrious Richard Stallman, the subject of cult-like ardour from techies everywhere and most known for his work at the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT. Stallman created a compiler, the GCC (GNU C Compiler), a feat of such engineering beauty that is said to still be one of the “most efficient and robust compilers ever created.” But the compiler (a program or set of programs that translated one computer programming language to another) by itself fell short of the free software distribution system Stallman had dreamed about.

Beginnings of MINIX

Concurrent to the GNU Project, Andrew Tanenbaum, then a Dutch professor, had designed an operating system from scratch with a mere 12,000 lines of code for his students to study in the classroom. MINIX, as he called it, was designed to run on the Intel 8086 microprocessors that had flooded the world market at the time. Based on UNIX, a time-sharing system written in the programming language of "C," it did not have the polish or robustness of commercial systems, but its advantage (and eventually it fame) was in its educational value and purpose: its source code was available to anyone.

For the first time, both novice programmers and closet hackers could view the source code (a much-gaurded secret in the commercial world) of a working OS. And one of those closet hackers was Linus Torvalds, then at the University of Helsinki. In an e-mail dated August 1991, Torvalds speaks of a free operating system that he had been tinkering with. The platform was based on MINIX and used "every feature of GCC" the young student could find. The excitment that this and subsequent emails created began to gather excitement in the programming community, and what Torvolds ended up with was, in his own words, "a better MINIX than MINIX."

According to Ragib Hasan, in an article published by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it took almost three years and the work of many programmers to release the original Linix kernel (version 1.0) in 1994. Finally, Stallman's open development model was realized, and the world had its first stable and free commercial operating system and subsequent public license software.

Linux Flavors

Today, Linux comes in many flavors - from SUSE Linux to MEPIS. All are free, with the exception of Red Hat, who discontinued support of its last free version in 2004.

A Gnu (Not Spiro)

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