Gnu project
This is a somewhat bowlderized history; please check the specifics before basing any research papers on it. Unix came to be back in 1969. and has evolved a great deal since then. It was reimplemented in C during 1972-1974, and is therefore the first source-portable operating system. Currently there are a wide variety of implementations of it, with varying degrees of compatibility, from a variety of vendors - Sun, Silicon Graphics, SCO, HP, IBM, etc. It quickly became a favorite among programmers and serious technical types, which significantly shaped its evolution to make it a very friendly and powerful OS for the kinds of uses that those types tended to put it to. The early dominion of AT&T, its high cost, and, as time went on, the greater disparities between other versions of the OS created a great need for a common, free Unix-like OS. The fact that the user base had a large contingent of system and application programmers meant that the ability to fill that need was there. So GNU was born. GNU, a recursive acronym for "GNU's not Unix!", has the primary goal of building a complete, free
As volunteers worked on the utilities, they became better and more featureful than the originals, and thus quite often any machine running a commercial Unix variant would stock GNU versions of utilities to take advantage of these features and to have a standardized version of them. So some Intel-based Unices were developed, including Minix. But Minix was not truly free, and had some problems. You often had to write your own device drivers, compile all the software you wanted to use, and organize the system yourself. By 1990, personal computers had finally gotten to the point where they had the power and essential features (virtual memory, memory protection, etc. GNU began systematically replacing all the standard Unix utilities - editors, archivers, shells, compilers, etc. Linux on your toasterThe Linux kernel has come a long way since then too. SummaryCurrently I would characterize Linux as being on a threshold between technical use and general use. But pretty soon folks started putting together distributions, which included an organized file system, utilities, and software already compiled and configured to work together. Movements are currently afoot to create integrated, easy-to-use desktop GUI environments for nontechnical users, and the distributions have come a long way in ease-of-installation. Currently, there are several free and commercial distributions - examples are Debian, RedHat, Caldera OpenLinux, and Slackware. ly-distributable, open-source Unix-like operating system.
Common topics in this essay:
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Linux Torvalds,
Pentium II,
Summary Currently,
GNU Linux,
HP IBM,
Intel Linux,
Unix-like OS,
GNU's Unix,
Slackware Linux,
operating system,
commercial unix,
source code,
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gnu's unix,
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Acceptance Essays
