A History Of Linux

How Linux went from being a programmer’s plaything to a worldwide operating system.
The presence of Linux in our lives is impossible to ignore. This open-source operating system has far outgrown its humble origins as a PC platform for people who hated Microsoft, and today it powers an estimated 78 per cent of the world’s smartphones under the Android moniker. Few people could deny that Linux has been a runaway success, and it is now the world’s third largest operating system behind the titans of Microsoft Windows and Apple iOS.
It wasn’t always like this. Linux was born in 1991 as the brainchild of IT student Linus Torvalds who became frustrated by the limitations of the UNIX operating system used by the University of Helsinki. He famously said, “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.”
It obviously became big and professional.
From the outset, Torvalds understood the importance of asking other people for their opinion on how to make existing software better – a philosophy that has been central to the Linux community ever since.
Linux’s formative months saw a ragtag team of programmers refining a basic kernel, rather reinforcing the stereotype that only IT experts could hope to use a non-Windows operating system. Linux 1.0 was launched in 1994 with little fanfare or public acknowledgement. Rather like the DOS-based Windows OS of the time, Linux was originally text-based – the concept of graphical user interfaces was still to make its mark. Early incarnations of Linux were complex and challenging, and it took a concerted effort from large-scale companies like Red Hat Enterprises to develop distributions simple enough for the general public to use. Today’s GUI-driven versions of Linux are as far removed from their forefathers as Windows 8 is from 3.1, and the likes of GNOME and KDE produce practical and attractive desktop environments that are no harder to operate than a Macbook Pro.
A key factor behind Linux’s early success was that by 1996 version 2.0 could serve several devices simultaneously. A focus on stable network functionality attracted the attention of leading computer manufacturers at a time when PCs were becoming connected across local area networks and the fledgling internet. Nonetheless, the support of corporate giants like Dell and Compaq somewhat  jarred with the self-supporting ethos of Linux’s amateur coding community. These philanthropic programmers were busy developing countless patches and drivers enabling an ever-greater number of programs and peripherals to run on Linux-powered machines.
It has been argued that the burgeoning popularity of Apple computers inadvertently promoted Linux throughout the 1990s as iOS established the principle that there was a world beyond Windows. Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system has long been a sworn enemy of Linux, and the Linux Foundation was established in 2000 (originally under a different title) to promote its kernel as a viable alternative. Despite the best efforts of the Linux community, however, plug-and-play compatibility with high-street peripherals was rare at the time. Updates had to be installed manually without any proprietary support beyond the advice on (thriving) Linux forums, unlike automatically-updating operating systems from Apple and Microsoft.
As is so often the way with new ventures, Linux has gradually splintered into different factions. These all utilise the same kernel architecture while employing varying user interfaces and incompatible software packages. Each Linux distro competes for market share and attempts to downplay the merits of its rivals. As a freely available program that can be endlessly modified to suit individual requirements, Linux has also become the foundation stone of a leading open source framework. In tandem with an Apache web server, MySQL database functionality and the PHP scripting language, the modular LAMP stack offers a low-cost and highly stable platform for hosting online content.
For dependable web hosting using Linux and its various distros take a closer look at our hosting solutions.