History Of Linux

When you say Linux, most people think of Windows, MacOS as an operating system. Operating system is a type of system software, and it can be said that it is a main system that drives the user to use the relevant device easily and conveniently. Kernel is a core component that is essential for operating systems like Linux.

So now we know that Linux is not an operating system. So, you may be wondering how to call it. I believe that it will be more visible if I compare this with history, so please allow me to add a little bit about the late antiquity.

The first use of the word computer as a physical record was first found in 1613 in the book The Young Mans Gleanings written by Richard Braithwaite. In the book, the person who does the work was used as a computer, and the definition was carried over to the 19th century.

Around 1822, Charles Babbage invented the Analytical Engine with the help of Ada Lovelace.

That is the real beginning of physical computers. Ada Lovelace is no exception. The world's first computer programmer as well as the mother of computers was a woman named Aga. It was the first algorithm that machines could process. Sadly, she was born on December 10, 1815 and died on November 27, 1852 at the age of 36. A very talented woman.

Charles Babbage's computer project, which began in 1822, succeeded 15 years later in 1837 and was recorded as the world's first General Mechanical Computer. However, due to insufficient funds, he was unable to continue this valuable machine project in his lifetime. It took many years, and by 1910, Charles Babbage's youngest son, Henry Babbage, was able to assemble the final parts of the Analytical Engine and begin performing basic calculations.

After that, between 1936 and 1938, a German named Konard Zuse was able to build Z1, the world's first electromagnetical computer in his parents' living room, the world's first binary programmable computer, and the world's first functional modern computer. He also created the world's first algorithm-based programming language and named it 'Plankalkül'. Later, they continued to produce computers such as Z3 & Z4. I didn't see Z2 in the records.

Z1 computer

Another is Alan Mathison Turing, who deserves to be called the father of computer science and AI. Mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist, Alan Turing may be familiar to many with his short name. He was able to print symbols on paper tape with the Turing Machine he created. Because he used a lot of logical instructions in the Turing Machine. This was the basis for modern computers. That was in 1936.

Then in 1937, Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and his students created the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC Computer). In the computer that used Boolean logic, more than 300 air tubes were created, and the program could not be used. But it made way for electrical computers. Because the ENIACs came about after that.

When talking about the era of the world's first computers, we cannot leave out the great ENIAC machine. The name Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator is used as an abbreviation. It might be more accurate to call them Giant ENIACs. I used 10 decimal digits without using binary yet. Because the size was too big, they were machines that could take up as much as a house.

Using electronics to store data The first computer that could run programs was the SSEM (Small Scale Experimental Machine) that appeared in 1948. He was also called Manchester Baby. Because I was born at the University of Manchester in England.

After that, in 1949, Cambridge University in England was able to create a machine called EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator). It is the second that can do data storage. It was the first computer that could run a GUI game called OXO, and used a 6-inch cathode ray tube for the display. Around the same time, the University of Manchester's Manchester Mark 1 computer appeared.

EDSAC

Mark 1

The world's first computer company was founded by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly and named the Electronic Controls Company. Later, it changed its name to EMCC (Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation) and produced UNIVAC computers. The name is called UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), which is a type of main frame computer.

The first computer with computer programs stored on memory was the UNIVAC 1101 computer. In 1950.

As for the commercial, it was Konrad Zuse's Z4 computer, which I mentioned above, and it was sold to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1950. It was sold after 8 years of production.

In 1953, the well-known IBM company introduced the 701 computer. It became the first electric computer to be produced mainly for scientific calculations, and since 19701 units were produced and sold, it was also the first computer to be mass produced. 701 is the area code of the United States.

The first computer that came with a CPU core and RAM was the Whirlwind machine introduced by MIT in 1955. It was the first computer that revolutionized the computer era. And the first computer with transistors was created by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1956.

A smaller computer was produced in 1960 by DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) as the Programmable Data Processor (PDF) computer. From the PDP-1 to the PDP-15.

The beginning of desktop computers was the Programma101, which was shown at the 1964 New York World's Fair. It was produced by the Olivetti company and sold 44,000 units at a price of $3,200 per unit. 

1939 by William Hewlett and David Packard; Hewlett-Packard (HP), which was founded on January 1, entered the computer market in 1968 with the HP9100A computer and became the largest computer manufacturer. And so computers continued to emerge at a rapid pace.

When it arrived in 1974, computers based on the GUI including a mouse, display, etc. began to appear, which brought a new era of computers. Operating systems are starting to expand.

After introducing Intel's Intel 4004 microprocessor in 1971, in 1973, Vietnamese André Truong Trong Thi and Frenchman Francois Gernelle invented the Micral Computer, and by using the Intel 8008 processor, they were able to produce the world's first microcomputer and sell it for $1750.

The term Personal Computer (PC) was first coined in 1975, and in September of that year, the first portable computer to be called a laptop was created. It used a 1.9MHz PALM processor, the RAM is only 64KB, and the display is only 5 inches. CPM (Characters Per Minute) operating system was used. The 24-and-a-half-pound laptop was sold for $1,795.

Apple's first generation Apple I computer was sold in 1976 for $666.66. It uses an 8 bit processor and 4KB RAM. It's ridiculous compared to today's computers. After that, IBM's PC came out in 1981, using the 8088 processor and 16KB of RAM. MS-DOS Operating System is used.

In summary, main frame computers appeared in 1950, and in the middle of 1950, an operating system called GMOS by General Motors for IBM began to appear. Before that, ENIAC & Main Frame computers did not have a dedicated Operating System. There were only machines that could run each program directly. After the emergence of the operating system, it became possible to run more than one application at a time.

In the early days of programming, we had to physically manipulate the machine's circuitry system. Later, they were able to develop assembly language and write codes that could be used for physical manipulation. And while trying to make it easier to use only assembly language, I was able to develop a compiler, and then I was able to use the C programming language. From the operating system, the language has arrived. Let's straighten it out.

After that, operating systems based on Control Data Corporation like SCOPE emerged. Up until that time, large computers were still huge in size. They were not very careful about operating systems because they were not yet easy for everyone to use.

When we look back at the history of computers, we can see that operating systems came into being in the late 1960s. An operating system named UNIX emerged from Bell Lab. The command line based Unix OS included apps called X Windows System to support GUI (then called Graphic Oriented OS). The Unix OS has many special add-on shells that can be used from the command line very often.

Solaris, BSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. are known Unix distros. Back then, Unix was a great OS to use, and it wasn't available for free. It is expensive to buy. In 1983, Richard Stallman started a Free Software Project named GNU (GNU is Not Unix).

The main purpose of GNU is to give computer users the freedom to copy, distribute, modify & develop etc. and to learn the operating system in depth and to make it easier if you want to create distros. GNU is developed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). GNU is not Unix but a Unix-like operating system.

Like Unix, GNU includes command line utilities, system libraries, and other tools needed to run a computer. Operating system has central components. One of them is Kernel. When GNU was created, its kernel, the Hurd, was not yet ready.

At that time, 21-year-old computer science student Linux Torvalds created a task switcher using an Intel 80386 and assembly language to create a Unix-like OS in April 1991. It was intended to create an entire OS, but version 0.01 was released in September of that year, and Official Linux 0.02 was released on October 5th.

You can run bash on Linux, I was also able to run gcc and many other GNU utilities. So, Linux grew in a short period of time, and when GNU, which was not yet ready for the Hurd kernel, adopted the Linux Kernel, everything went well, and Linux became incredibly successful. GNU OS uses the Linux Kernel, so it is called GNU/Linux OS.

Later, even though GNU's Hurd Kernel became convenient, compared to the Linux Kernel, the performance was slow. According to Ecosystem, devices are more convenient and easy with Linux Kernel. GNU based distros that use the Linux Kernel are also increasing. Linux Kernel is better and can compete with Unix. The original purpose of GNU is to promote Free & Open Source software, so the Linux Kernel continues to be widely used.

Kernel is a core component that is included in the lifeblood of an operating system. In order for the software to work, the hardware resources such as input/output devices can be controlled with the help of the device driver. Let's put it simply, the Kernel is a busy and important thing because it works between hardware and applications.